Archinect - News

Manhattan’s office building spree is now ‘over,’ according to the New York Times

2023-12-29T11:49:00-05:00

Just three large office towers — of more than 500,000 square feet — are being built across New York City, with two expected to open in 2024 or 2025 and nothing else projected to go up for years. Normally, a handful of sites that size would be in various stages of construction, with at least one opening every year since 2018, according to JLL, a real estate services firm.

Due to an obvious confluence of interest rates, office vacancy records, and construction costs, the Times says Manhattan is “entering its most significant office construction drought since after the savings and loan crisis in the late 1980s and early ’90s.” Recent superlatives like BIG’s 66-story The Spiral and the Foster + Partners-led 270 Park Avenue replacement may stand as the last major realized office designs before the early 2030s. Another three proposals totaling over 3 million square feet are stuck in the approvals pipeline as of right now.

The stasis has notably led to the cancellation of the much-maligned ten-block Penn Station revitalization plan, among other significant stall-outs. A “flight” to high-quality modernized office spaces of the kind featured in 425 Park Avenue and One Vanderbilt could spark a turnaround if not for their asking price. As the report stated, some industry experts believe $200 or $300 per square foot rents might be a reality for similar buildin...

New York City is actually sinking under the weight of its skyscrapers

2023-05-22T13:57:00-04:00

New York City is sinking under the weight of its skyscrapers, new research shows, which could put its population of more than 8 million people at an increased risk of coastal flooding. [...] Researchers estimated the weight of all of New York City’s buildings to be around 842 million tons. But to find the areas more vulnerable to sinking — or, as they call it in more scientific terms, “subsidence” — a key factor to consider was the type of soil beneath the buildings.

A new study authored by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) found the city to be sinking at a rate of between 1 to 2 millimeters per year, while parts of Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island are subsiding at a rate of 2.75 millimeters. This comes at a time when planning officials, architects, and building owners are scrambling to adapt to the shrinking office market accelerated by the pandemic.

The increased flood risk, enhanced by construction densification, is particularly dangerous to coastal cities whose clay-rich soil causes “material softness and ability to flow under pressure,” according to the study.

These are the global cities with the most skyscrapers

2022-09-22T14:15:00-04:00

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has released data chronicling the prevalence of buildings with total heights taller than 150 meters (492 feet) in major metropolitan areas across the world.

The statistics speak to several yearslong industry-wide trends as well as a preference for the recently-halted practice of (extremely) tall-building in China, which had more entries in the Top 25 (10, excluding Hong Kong) than the United States, Canada, and Australia put together.

Dubai has by far the largest stock of 300-meter (984 feet) or more structures at 28. New York, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen are the only cities with 10 or more in the same category. Australia’s largest city, Sydney, had fewer overall entries than the Philippines city of Makati, despite hosting a population almost tenfold its size. London was one of only two UK metros listed.

The new overall Top...

2020 Tall Buildings Report: pandemic contributes to decline in completions

2021-01-18T13:43:00-05:00

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has published its latest annual web report, Tall Buildings in 2020, with plenty of facts and figures on the state of the skyscraper construction industry during a year full of pandemic-related uncertainty.

With 106 completions of buildings 200 meters and taller in 2020, the number constitutes a 20-percent decline compared to 133 completions in 2019.

Completions Timeline. Illustration courtesy of CTBUH.

While the two tallest buildings completed in 2020 are in New York City (Central Park Tower and One Vanderbilt), the United States ranks with 10 completed tall buildings only a distant third in both total number of completions as well as sum of heights compared to China (56 completions) and the United Arab Emirates (12 completions, all in Dubai).

The ten tallest buildings completed in 2020 are:

Central Park Tower, New York City, United States,
98 floors, 472 m / 1,550 ft
Design Architect: Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture
One Vanderbi...

Architects lobby for bird-friendly glass as NYC overhauls cladding regulations

2019-09-09T20:30:00-04:00

It is estimated that up to 1 billion birds die every year in the United States due to collisions with glass facades and buildings, according to experts at the American Bird Conservancy and the Smithsonian.

This worrisome statistic has prompted municipalities to institute "bird-friendly" glass standards for certain types of buildings in cities as diverse as Minnesota, Oakland, Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, and Toronto.

New York City is poised to become the latest municipality to try and reduce the number of bird collisions by adopting new rules that would require up to 90-percent of glass on new and altered buildings to be treated with films, coatings, and other decorative elements to ensure that birds can see and avoid the expanses.

FXCollaborative's Center for Global Conservation uses bird-safe glass. Image courtesy of David Sundberg/ESTO.

As the New York City Council's Committee on Housing and Buildings continues to debate the proposed regulations, architects are speaking out...

Tallest skyscraper in New Jersey nears completion

2019-08-30T15:30:00-04:00

99 Hudson Street, a 900-foot tower residential tower designed by architects Perkins Eastman for developers China Overseas America in Jersey City, New Jersey, is nearing completion.

The tower topped out as New Jersey's tallest skyscraper in late 2018. In recent weeks, according to New York YIMBY, Plaza Construction, the builders for the project, and Vidaris, exterior envelope consultants, have made extensive progress installing the tower's glass and Jura limestone facades.

Rendering of 99 Hudson Street and the surrounding towers. Image courtesy of Perkins Eastman.

The 79-story tower's facades are marked by alternating vertical bands of stone and glass panels, while the extruded tower's sheer exposures culminate in a stepped glass and stone crown.

The hexagonal tower is set to include 781-apartments and 16,000 square feet of commercial spaces. The tower-and-podium-style complex is marked by a series of plazas and an eight-story base containing 609 parking stalls. According to a pro...

$100 million plan to stabilize Handel Architects' leaning San Francisco tower takes a step forward

2019-08-28T15:30:00-04:00

The [stabilization plan] calls for 52 piles to be drilled 250 feet down into bedrock to shore up the building, now leaning 17 inches to the north and west. The 2-foot-thick circular steel piles would be filled with steel reinforced concrete. Twenty-two would be sunk along Mission Street and 30 on Fremont Street.

The reinforcements will join the tower's existing 950-pile foundation in helping to stop the tower's drift.

According to The San Francisco Chronicle, a report written by a panel of experts studying solutions to the sinking problem states, "In our professional opinion, once the foundation retrofit is constructed, the building is expected to have performance consistent with the stated design objectives."

Our dependence on concrete is exhausting global sand supplies

2019-08-26T14:00:00-04:00

China may be the biggest consumer of sand right now, but the issue is a global one. A UN report published earlier this year showed that sand extraction is far outstripping the rates at which it is replenished. According to a team of scientists who recently wrote about the topic in Science Magazine ($) and The Conversation, “Sand and gravel are now the most-extracted materials in the world”–measured by weight, they surpass fossil fuels and biomass.

Writing in Forbes, Laurie Winkless probes the far-reaching and destructive impacts of skyrocketing global sand consumption as the world's urbanizing cities demand more and more of the substance to fuel new construction.

London to regulate wind design for new skyscrapers

2019-08-20T09:00:00-04:00

Tougher building rules for skyscrapers have been drawn up by the City of London because of concerns that a high-rise, urban microclimate will generate winds capable of knocking over cyclists and pedestrians. Developers will have to provide more comprehensive safety assessments of how proposed buildings will affect people on street level, with more robust testing of roadways and pavements using detailed scale models in wind tunnels and computer simulations.

After a series of high-profile skyscraper design controversies, including documented incidents of pedestrians being knocked off their feet and cyclists being pushed sideways into the path of vehicles due to strong skyscraper-generated winds, London is moving to regulate the wind-driven impacts of new high-rise towers in the city.

Moving forward, the city will require tower projects to meet a tougher set of wind regulations at the start of the design development phase, according to The Guardian. Those tests will be coupled with later “micro-level” examinations of a given tower’s design that will test the magnitude and degree of wind generated by the forms of new skyscrapers, as measured from “36 wind directions, using separate consultants for computer and physical simulations,” according to The Guardian.

Under the new rules, the speed of downdrafts created by new towers will be capped at 18 miles per hour. Measured speeds at that level and above will be classified as being “uncomf...

Height vs. Hashtags: Where do the world's tallest skyscrapers stack up?

2019-08-20T07:00:00-04:00

With plenty of futuristic and architecturally diverse buildings to choose from, which of these world-famous designs has gained the title of the most popular on Instagram around the world? We gathered research to find out the most Instagrammed skyscrapers in the world [...] we wanted to see what the total height of these Instagram photos would be in comparison to the height of the buildings themselves.

With the looming presence social media has over the built environment, iconic buildings have never been easier to track down, especially as platforms like Instagram make high-profile architecture accessible at the press of a button.

Dublin Airport Central recently conducted a study to understand where five of the most instagrammed skyscrapers rank against their related hashtags.

Stacked column next to image of building: the group used Polaroid pictures as if they were printed and piled up. Graph courtesy of Dublin Airport Central

According to Dublin Airport Central, despite no longer being the tallest building in the world, the Empire State Building is the most instagrammed skyscraper in the world. If those individually tagged posts are printed out as physical Polaroid photos and stacked one on top of the other, according to the source, the height of all the “hashtagged” photos of the Empire State Building easily towers over the skyscraper itself.

The Burj Khalifa, on the other han...

Brooklyn Botanic Garden protests shadow-casting skyscraper with “Fight for Sunlight” exhibition

2019-08-01T16:08:00-04:00

A proposed mixed-use development slated for a site beside the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG) in New York City has BBG officials worried that the shadows created by the project’s twin 39-story towers will deprive the garden’s specimens of vital sunlight.

Gothamist reports that the brewing public battle between BBG and developers Continuum Company and Lincoln Equities reached a new level this week, as BBG debuted its Fight for Sunlight exhibition, a graphics-heavy information campaign designed to convey the magnitude of the damage that could be caused to the institution’s plants were the project to come into being. According to BBG, the garden is “one of the only places in New York City where you can see such a diverse collection of rare plants in bloom year-round.”

View of the five-building greenhouse cluster designed by Davis, Brody and Associates. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user Elisa.rolle.

The 1.4 million-square-foot development is currently undergoing environmental review, accor...

Is it time to ban all-glass skyscrapers?

2019-07-31T19:02:00-04:00

“If you’re building a greenhouse in a climate emergency, it’s a pretty odd thing to do to say the least,” said Simon Sturgis, an adviser to the government and the Greater London Authority, as well as chairman of the Royal Institute of British Architects sustainability group. “If you’re using standard glass facades you need a lot of energy to cool them down, and using a lot of energy equates to a lot of carbon emissions.”

As the global community continues to mobilize against the rising threat of climate collapse, cities and other entities are moving toward banning or limiting the future development of all-glass skyscrapers due to the buildings' high energy demands, according to a report in The Guardian.

For decades, designers have relied on technological approaches like double- and triple-glazing facade units to maximize the energy performance of these designs, but as the limited lifespan of these systems comes under question, it has become clear that more drastic efforts are needed.

Simon Sturgis, chairman of the Royal Institute of British Architects sustainability group, told The Guardian, “To mitigate the amount of energy used to cool these buildings, you have to produce a really complicated façade, which is usually triple glazed.”

Sturgis added, “But double glazed units and laminated glass don’t last very long – 40 years or so. So you have to replace your facade every 40 years, that’s also not...

Postmodern building named to "11 most endangered" list for the first time

2019-05-30T13:59:00-04:00

In a sign of the rising concern over the future of postmodern architecture in the American preservation community, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has named the 34-year-old Helmut Jahn-designed James R. Thompson Center in Chicago to its annual “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places” list.

In making the cut, the 17-story Illinois state government building becomes the first work of postmodern architecture named to the influential list.

Exterior view of the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago, Photo courtesy Landmarks Illinois

The orange and blue-tinted glass and steel building opened in 1985 as a rebuke to a then-dominant modernist architecture ideology that called for austere and aseptic expanses of curtain walled glass for office buildings. Designed with sloped exterior glazing and a base marked by a perimeter arcade accented with alternating colored panels, the building presents a degree of consideration for the public that challenged the conventional notions of...

Here are the creative skyscraper designs selected as winners of eVolo's 2019 Skyscraper Competition

2019-04-30T15:32:00-04:00

eVolo Magazine has announced the winners of this year's Skyscraper Competition, which is one of the biggest and best known architectural ideas competitions out there.

The yearly contest invites entrants to submit their most creative skyscraper designs that rethink vertical architecture and its relationship to the built and natural environments.

This year, the jury selected three winners hailing from Serbia, Poland, and the United Kingdom, along with 27 honorable mentions. Among the 2019 winners are a vertical city-district in Belgrade that serves as landfill; another that cleans the air of heavily polluted areas; and a nature reserve skyscraper with research facilities.

Below, take a look at the winning entries!

1ST PLACE: METHANESCRAPER
by Marko Dragicevic | Serbia

1ST PLACE: METHANESCRAPER by Marko Dragicevic | Serbia

Project description: "Basing its foundations on the outlines of the Belgrade city, the new infrastructure gene...

Bill de Blasio's Green New Deal for NYC targets glass and steel skyscrapers

2019-04-22T13:30:00-04:00

"We're going to ban the classic glass and steel skyscrapers, which are incredibly inefficient," Bill de Blasio said on "Morning Joe." As the New York City mayor lays out plans for a municipal Green New Deal, he is looking to target one of the biggest sources of emissions in the city: buildings.

De Blasio explained that traditional skyscrapers would become difficult to build due to strong energy efficient mandates. "If someone wants to build one of those things, they can take a whole lot of steps to make it energy efficient", he told the MSNBC crew.

The mayor added that the city will also target private building owners for not retrofitting for energy efficiency. In his Green New Deal, owners that don't slash emission by 30% by 2030 will receive fines, with the largest buildings potentially facing penalties as high as $1 million or more.

He also went on to promise that the city will get all of its energy from renewable sources within the next five years.

China's projected tallest building reduces height, now ranking 5th tallest

2018-08-29T16:15:00-04:00

Greenland Wuhan Center, designed to surpass the Shanghai Tower and become China’s tallest building, will be falling short of its planned 636 metres (2086 feet) height, after the local government prescribed a 21 percent reduction in height for the central China supertall, according to an account in local media outlet the Paper.

Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture won the competition back in 2010 to design China's tallest, and the world's 4th tallest, building. The supertall was originally designed to reach 126 floors, however construction halted in August last year stopping at the 96th floor.

The height reduction is due to safety concerns with the expansion of the city's air transit hub completed in 2017. The original 126 floors would now be in the path of planes approaching the Tianhe International Airport. The building will now only reach 1,640 feet making it China’s fifth-tallest.

Are glass skyscrapers bad for cities? Architects chime in

2018-01-25T15:41:00-05:00

But a number of prominent architects and urban planners have been speaking out against the material's overuse. [...] They raise questions about the impact glass structures have on our public spaces and the fabric of our cities. Developers demand floor-to-ceiling windows, abundant natural light and views worth charging tenants for -- but what about the rest of us?

Architects including Ken Shuttleworth (who worked on The Gherkin) and Alan Ritchie (who co-founded PJAR Architects with Philip Johnson) give their two cents on the issues about the abundant use of glass in skyscrapers, from energy efficiency to their uninviting appearance — and yes, that one time the 20 Fenchurch Street building partially melted a car.

"It makes sense to put glass if you've got a nice view, and it makes sense to put glass at the top to let daylight in. But it doesn't make much sense to put glass at the bottom where there's no view and a limited amount of daylight penetration. It's just about being sensible," Ken Shuttleworth tells CNN.

Report: The year 2017 in skyscrapers

2017-12-14T19:25:00-05:00

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat is out with the latest edition of its annual web report, the 2017 Tall Building Year in Review, and it's a real treat for every serious skyscraper geek: interactive charts, rankings, and plenty of visualized data about all 144 buildings of 200 meters' height or greater that reached completion within the past 12 months.

Skyline: the tallest 2017 completions. Click here for a super high-resolution version.

Taking the top ten spots for 2017 completions are five towers in China, three in Dubai, one in South Korea, and one in Los Angeles (the United States had only one tower among the top 50 this year):

Ping An Finance Center, Shenzhen, China,
115 stories, 599 m / 1965 ft,
Design Architect: Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates
Lotte World Tower, Seoul, South Korea,
123 stories, 555 m / 1819 ft,
Design Architect: Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates
Marina 101, Dubai, United Arab Emirates,
101 stories, 425 m / 1394 ft,
Design Architect: National Engineering Bure...

FXFOWLE proposes attaching 300-foot spire to skyscraper to become Hudson Yards' tallest

2017-08-10T12:47:00-04:00

Hudson Yards has been making headlines in recent months...But immediately to the northwest, another tower that’s been in the making for an equally long period of time may have just received a boost to become the tallest of them all. A new rendering of the Moinian Group’s 3 Hudson Boulevard has surfaced, showing both an updated design for the building itself, as well as the addition of a 300-foot spire, that would make the supertall the tallest in the neighborhood.

Despite years of vigorous effort in the Hudson Yards, the Related Companies may not have the tallest skyscraper of them all, thanks to FXFOWLE's proposed spire-tastic tower on 3 Hudson Boulevard. Nothing's final as of yet, but as YIMBY notes, "Back in 2012, YIMBY heard speculation that the tower, previously dubbed The Girasole, could rise as tall as 432 Park Avenue. While 1,350 feet isn’t quite 1,397 feet, the new height would certainly rival the supertalls of 57th Street, ranking in between 30 Hudson Yards’ approximately 1,300-foot parapet, and 432 Park Avenue, as the city’s fifth tallest building measured by pinnacle."

NYC's super skinny skyscraper is fat with cost overruns, prompting a lawsuit

2017-07-27T17:09:00-04:00

The best things in life are free, but construction cranes still cost money, which has prompted an investor to sue the developers behind SHoP's 111 West 57th Street for failing to budget appropriately for the cost of cranes (among other things) for the super skinny tower, which is already way over budget and only approximately 25% assembled. According to Curbed NY:

One of the investors on the project is suing the developers and the lender over alleged construction cost overruns.

The lawsuit, filed in the Manhattan Supreme Court, alleges that the project is already $50 million over budget when it hasn’t even reached 20-stories yet. Eventually the building is proposed to rise to 1,421 feet with 82 stories.

What ants can teach us about the Eiffel Tower

2017-07-18T17:36:00-04:00

Scientists at Georgia Tech were trying to figure out how ants built themselves into towers to escape confinement or danger. They put a small pole in the middle of a dishful of ants and filmed what happened. The ants, they found, climb upwards, on top of each other, until they find an empty spot. Then they stop. The next one does the same, and so on.

Alexander McQueen, rebel of the fashion world renowned for his wildly imaginative designs, always said that there is no better designer than nature. Through billions of years of evolution, life's products, so to speak, have been extensively prototyped, market tested, upgraded and refined. So, it is no wonder then why creative minds increasingly turn to nature to look for innovative design solutions.

Often referred to as biomimicry, the discipline has had a growing presence in the field of architectural design. With a recent study from Georgia Institute of Technology on how fire ants form towers, the architectural world has a new potential take away from nature. Done simply through trial-and-error, the fire ants create bell shaped structures by climbing on top of each other until they find an empty spot, at which point they stop. Each ant supports only three others above them, creating a structure where each ant bears the same load and the results look a lot like the famed Eiffel To...

Watch a century of downtown L.A.'s development in 2 minutes of 3D animated renderings

2017-06-20T12:40:00-04:00

Ever wondered when the high-rises in downtown Los Angeles were built? This two-minute video of animated renderings by Commercial Cafe provides a brief history and date for most of the skyscrapers downtown, from City Hall to the Wilshire Grand, concluding with a color-coded erection sequence by decade. As the towers sprout from the soil, it's interesting to note that development has slowed considerably since its late 20th century zenith, although the tallest building west of the Mississippi did top out earlier this year:

Dragon-proofing: why skyscrapers in Hong Kong have holes

2017-03-30T18:55:00-04:00

Have you ever realized that Hong Kong skyscrapers have holes in them? They're called dragon gates, and according to the Chinese principle feng shui these holes allow dragons to fly from the mountains to the water each day. It's believed that blocking the dragon's path could bring misfortune. Buildings with bad feng shui, such as the Bank of China Tower, have been blamed for surrounding companies going out of business.

Double-paned, waterproofed windows for insulation? Check. Reinforced steel beams for stability during an earthquake? Check. Hole in the center of the building so dragons can fly through?

Are skyscrapers making you sick? A new £7 million study is trying to find out

2017-03-20T14:15:00-04:00

“More and more people are living and working in high-rises and office blocks, but the true impact of vibrations on them is currently very poorly understood,” states Alex Pavic, Professor of Vibration Engineering at the University of Exeter.

“Humans spend 90 per cent of their lives in buildings which vibrate non-stop, but there is still very little reliable information about the effect of structural vibration.”

To fill this lacuna, a £7 million study will look at the effects of skyscrapers on human inhabitants, with a particular focus on potential roles triggering motion-sickness, sleepiness and even depression.

When you’re in a skyscraper, you may feel stable but, in fact, the building is probably slightly moving in response to wind or external forces like nearby construction. This is especially true in buildings constructed after the 1970s, when floor slabs became thinner and lighter. Alongside wider spaces between columns, this means newer buildings tend to not dampen vibrations as ...

A Trump Tower in L.A.? Thankfully, that was only part of "Never Built Los Angeles"

2017-02-15T00:51:00-05:00

In LA, Trump bragged he was going to spend a billion dollars on what he claimed would become the world’s tallest building. His architect Bill Fain delivered a gilded 125-storey office tower etched in a diamond-patterned exoskeleton...David Martin also devised a skyscraper: ‘When I told Ivana [Trump] the basis of the idea was to put two diamonds together, she lit up,’ Martin said. ‘I think they were divorced a week later.’

Whether you've been following the tumultuous life of proposed architecture projects in Los Angeles or not (a stretch of Grand Avenue, for example, has been undergoing elaborate proposals designed in part by Frank Gehry for almost forty years) "Never Built Los Angeles," a book by architectural critics at large Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, shows us via The Guardian the almost-reality of a Los Angeles-based Trump Tower designed by Johnson Fain back in 1989.

John Southern unpacks the role of the skyscraper in the 21st century city at a new exhibition at Jai & Jai Gallery

2016-11-03T17:57:00-04:00

In the public imaginary, skyscrapers represent something like the pinnacle of architecture. Cities compete to have the tallest. The most iconic become keychains. Tourists wait for hours—and forfeit cash—to climb to their tops. But according to John Southern of Urban Operations, there is something deeply sinister about the skyscraper and its role in the contemporary city.

“If the early modernist skyscraper proposals of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe were attempts at utopian urbanity and aesthetic prowess, then today’s towers reflect a darker, more nihilistic attitude toward spatial democracy,” writes Southern in a text accompanying his new exhibit Hot on the Heels of Love: Sensational Speculations, which opens this Saturday at Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles.

“Packed with every experience and function, and produced in almost every shape and material finish imaginable, the contemporary skyscraper has become a disaffected breeding ground for neoliberal proposals, which reject the op...

Kids play with virtual skyscrapers in new app

2016-08-04T19:08:00-04:00

"Spark a blackout, fix a pipe, or clog the toilets. Test your building’s engineering when dinosaurs invade, lightning strikes, or the earth quakes. Find out what keeps skyscrapers standing tall and people happy in them all." So says the description of the newly launched Skyscrapers by Tinybop, a game app for kids that allows users to essentially play in and around skyscrapers, like an urban-planning minded King Kong. Players can construct their own towers and then wreck havoc (or try to maintain order) with their creations. Here are a few screenshots of the game in action:

For more on games (it's Archinect's editorial theme this month):

And here's a video:

How does an architect reflect the life of a city in an abstract skyscraper?

2016-07-06T12:46:00-04:00

Ole Scheeren wanted to meet his client's request for a skyscraper that would stand out in the already hyperbolic architecture of Bangkok primarily by designing something that wasn't trying so hard. Instead of going for a wild, crazy shape, Scheeren started by vertically extruding an abstract square.

However, as he notes in this CNN video, "Of course, this move exactly exemplifies the problem of the skyscraper. It is an abstract silhouette in a skyline that has no relationship to the city, and does not speak at all of the people that actually live in it or inhabit it. So I wanted to open up the new shaft of the tower and reveal the grain of its inhabitation. Through the usage of it, the people that will live in these three dimensional units will start to define the image of the building. The building will project the life of the people back to the city that gave it."

Watch the full video on CNN

Another speedy “Pyonghattan” skyscraper project is underway

2016-06-29T14:55:00-04:00

Hoping to show the world his country is doing just fine despite sanctions and outside pressure over its nuclear weapons program, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has put his soldier-builders to work on yet another major [skyscraper] project Pyongyang’s new Pyonghattan, officially called “Ryomyong Street,” is to have the country’s tallest apartment building, at 70 stories, along with a 50-story building and a handful of smaller ones in the 30-40 story range.

“[Kim's] soldier-builders are now putting up the frames for each new floor at the reportedly breakneck-pace of 14 hours to get it all done by the end of the year.”

CTBUH announces the 2016 Tall Building Awardees

2016-06-24T17:47:00-04:00

Visually changing skylines aside, new sky-high structures get a shot at prestigious recognition in the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat's Tall Building Awards. The yearly awards highlight noteworthy tall-building projects worldwide and the impact they have on inhabitants and their urban surroundings, as well as innovative design and construction methods that push the industry forward.

A little sneak peek:

Best Tall Building - Middle East & Africa: The Cube, Beirut

10 Year Award: Hearst Tower, New York

Urban Habitat Award: Wuhan Tiandi, Wuhan

See the rest of the winners plus the Best Tall Building regional finalists over on Bustler.

Previously on Archinect:

A glimpse at the 2015 CTBUH Best Tall Buildings regional winners

2014 was the tallest year by far for skyscrapers, CTBUH finds

Ateliers Jean Nouvel’s One Central Park wins CTBUH Best Tall Building Worldwide 2014