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Among this new breed of towers, design elements not directly tied to profit are often downgraded or eliminated as overall costs climb. [...] With today’s mathematically generated super-spires, it’s best to paraphrase Mae West: “Architecture has nothing to do with it.”
[...] much as the new super-tall New York condos may serve that same general purpose, these are no works of art. If, as Goethe posited, architecture is frozen music, then these buildings are vertical money.
— The New York Review of Books
Related: Too Rich, Too Thin, Too Tall? View full entry
Many of the tallest structures in the world are not designed by starchitects, and you’ve likely never seen them [...] dozens of nearly anonymous towers around the United States, most in small rural communities, dwarf all but the tallest man-made structures in the world.
Take the KVLY-TV Tower in Blanchard, North Dakota, a township of 26 people north of Fargo. At 2,063 feet (628.8 meters), it’s the tallest structure in the western hemisphere and the fourth-tallest structure in the world.
— Re:form
City of Minneapolis planners on Friday rejected a proposal for an 80-story tower downtown and revealed problems they saw in the efforts of its developer.
The move quashed the prospects for a building that would have surpassed the IDS Center to become the tallest in Minnesota and injected new drama into an unusual public contest the city created to redevelop a parking lot on Nicollet Mall.
— startribune.com
The Shanghai Tower is projected to be the one megatall tower to be completed this year, according to The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat's 2014 Tall Building Data Research Report. Since construction began in 2008, the 632-meter structure recently began its final phase.Designed by a... View full entry
But all New Yorkers are losing familiar vistas, and some are losing light and air, as supertall buildings sprout like beanstalks in midtown Manhattan. There are a dozen such “supertalls” – buildings of 1,000 feet or higher – in the construction or planning stages. And the buildings are not, as in Dubai or Shanghai’s Pudong district, being constructed where nothing else had stood. They are, instead, crowding into already dense neighbourhoods where light and air are at a premium [...]. — theguardian.com
Related: Welcome to the permanent dusk: Sunlight in cities is an endangered species View full entry
When Shanghai Tower opens as China’s tallest building next year, the 2,073-foot (632 m) tower will feature elevators capable of traveling 40.3 miles (64.8 km) per hour, or 59 feet (18 m) per second, a new milestone. [...]
The question facing the industry today: how fast can elevators go without sacrificing comfort? [...]
At 66 feet (20 m) per second, even the slightest vibration will create a shock for passengers.
— urbanland.uli.org
Related: Up and Down, Side to Side; ThyssenKrupp's cable-free MULTI elevator to begin testing in 2016 View full entry
The Urban Green Council, which calls these glass towers “high cholesterol buildings,” published a report earlier this month, which asserts that high energy use associated with the use of clear glass degrades air quality and exacerbates global warming... the Council is urging for the reduction of transparent glass, replaced with heavily insulated solid walls or highly advanced glass facades that would be more expensive. — 6sqft.com
Imagined with bright pink and green lights, standing more than 150m taller than the Burj Khalifa and emerging from an island in a lake in central China, these plans for Wuhan’s Phoenix Towers seem a world away from grey old London.
Yet the ambitious design revealed this week has been put forward by the British architectural firm Chetwoods, and owes much of its inspiration to an award-winning project for a new, greener London Bridge.
— independent.co.uk
It remains to be seen if Wuhan's Phoenix Towers will enjoy a smoother run to completion than Hunan's failed Sky City project — once proposed as the world's tallest building. View full entry
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
Did Paul Goldberger just say that women can never be too thin? View full entry
Once complete the tower will be the world’s tallest, beating current record holder the 828m-tall Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
Client Jeddah Economic Company has not yet confirmed the exact height of the tower, but has indicated it will be over 1km tall.
In December, contractor Saudi Bauer completed piling work for the tower, including sinking 270 piles up to a depth of 110m.
— bdonline.co.uk
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
Previously: Sky City, world's tallest building, stops construction due to lack of government approval View full entry
He's already designed the world's tallest building (and highest apartments) at the Burj Khalifa, as well as Chicago's highest apartments (and second tallest tower). Now, Adrian Smith will be the architect of 225 West 57th Street, set to become New York City's tallest apartment building at 1,550 feet or higher. The project is years away, but it is already chasing a number of other 1,000-plus-foot projects onto the skyline. — New York Observer
After winning Phase 1 of the design competion for the supertall Cheongna City Tower (formerly known as Tower Infinity) in Incheon, South Korea (previously on Bustler), international practice GDS Architects has now also taken the Fist Prize in the invited competition (Phase 2) to do the project through design development. — bustler.net
At that height, the new tower would become the second tallest building in the city, surpassing the Empire State Building and even 1 World Trade Center, if you don’t count the 400-foot antenna that drives its height to the symbolic reaches of 1,776 feet. — Observer
It's mostly just idle Internet speculation, but it's the most intriguing thing the Uruguayan has designed since the Walkie Talkie tower. The project is located on the old Drake Hotel site, at 57th Street and Park Avenue, and can be seen from Central Park in the rendering above—Jean Nouvel's... View full entry