Skyscrapers designed by some of the world's biggest firms go head to head to get to the top in the yearly Emporis Skyscraper Award, the international prestigious prize for skyscrapers.

Winning the top prize this year is Renzo Piano and Adamson Associates' "The Shard", which is also currently Western Europe's tallest building at 306 meters tall. The London-based tower was chosen out of 300 skyscrapers at least 100 m. in height and that were completed in the previous calendar year. — bustler.net

These days, it is not just a woman who can never be too rich or too thin. You can say almost exactly the same thing about skyscrapers, or at least about the latest residential ones now going up in New York City, which are much taller, much thinner, and much, much more expensive than their predecessors. And almost every one of them seems built to be taller, thinner, and pricier than the one that came before. — vanityfair.com

Ever taller, ever thinner, the new condo towers racing skyward in Midtown Manhattan are breaking records for everything, including price. Sold for $95 million, the 96th floor of 432 Park Avenue will be the highest residence in the Western world. As shadows creep across Central Park, Paul Goldberger looks at the construction, architecture, and marketing of these super-luxury aeries, gauging their effect on the city’s future. — vanityfair.com

Architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, Blair Kamin, writes about China's building boom in his story, "Designed in Chicago, made in China." [...]

"Chinese developers lack the expertise to do great skyscrapers," he says. "During the Cultural Revolution their architectural profession was decimated. It really became more about purely engineering. So if you're a Chinese developer, you go to Chicago." — Public Radio International

The White House may be the centre of great power, but it is not in itself that big or that shouty. It’s just a nice, white house, rather elegant, with a fine sweeping drive, but utterly dwarfed by the US Treasury next door – a fact that is, in itself, a bit of a clue to the relative significance of wealth in American society. [...]

If the White House gleams simply because of the influence of the man inside it, the rest of the Washington complex is designed to make its case for significance. — telegraph.co.uk

The winners for the 9th annual eVolo Skyscraper Competition have finally been revealed! The sky is indeed the limit for the popular worldwide competition, which gave participants complete freedom with their skyscraper designs. Imaginative ideas aside, entrants also had to examine the skyscraper's definition, purpose, and potential in the 21st century. — bustler.net

Cranes that have helped to build the Shanghai Tower, China's tallest building and the world's second tallest, are seen being dismantled. — telegraph.co.uk

Up until recently Canary Wharf was the only place for skyscrapers in London. [...]

Now it seems that London is going to receive a more cohesive skyline, with a new study produced by the New London Architecture (NLA) thinktank suggesting that at least 236 tall buildings (those over 20 storeys in height) are currently proposed, approved or under construction in the capital. — independent.co.uk

What have we learned so far about how cities function — and how they don’t? What is the role of that most symbolic of city features, the skyscraper? And is it possible to “break” a city? Five experts offered their perspectives on the use of data to solve urban problems, the ways in which the skyscraper is venerated and misused, and their best guesses on what the cities of the future might look like. — nytimes.com

Six years after Comcast Corp. moved into the tallest U.S. skyscraper between Manhattan and Chicago, the cable-TV and Internet giant expects to break ground this summer on an even taller, more dazzling $1.2-billion tower. [...]

One of the world's leading architects, Britain's Norman Robert Foster, has designed the trophy building with a host of innovative features. — philly.com

The skyline of Taiyuan, the capital and largest city of North China's Shanxi province, is scheduled to receive a 280-meter / 919-foot addition soon: German firm HENN has won the architectural competition to design the new Cenke Group tower sporting a slick convex shell. Planning is expected to commence in 2014/15. — bustler.net

Wiel Arets Architects announced today the completion of the Anna van Buerenplein (AvB) Tower located in The Hague in The Netherlands. Standing at 72 m (approx. 236 ft), the steel AvB Tower was built as a "hyper-hybrid" academic building that includes housing, dining, and retail for students and faculty. — bustler.net

We noticed in Journal 2013 Issue I’s case study on Kingdom Tower, Jeddah, that a fair amount of the top of the building seemed to be an unoccupied spire. This prompted us to investigate the increasing trend towards extreme spires and other extensions of tall buildings that do not enclose usable space, and create a new term to describe this – Vanity Height, i.e., the distance between a skyscraper’s highest occupiable floor and its architectural top, as determined by CTBUH Height Criteria. — CTBUH

China is home to 60 of the world’s 100 tallest buildings now under construction. But the skyward aspirations of Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, have inspired incredulity tinged with hostility. [...] the project’s scale and speed have set off a burst of national introspection in recent days about whether Chinese municipal leaders and developers have gone too far in their increasingly manic reach for the skies. — nytimes.com

It's time for the infamous eVolo Skyscraper Competition! As many of you here are probably familiar with, eVolo Magazine's Skyscraper Competition gives participants complete freedom with their skyscraper designs while thoroughly examining its definition, its purposes, and its potential in the 21st century. All students, architects, engineers, and designers are welcome to compete—with multidisciplinary teams being encouraged. So start gathering your teams now! — bustler.net