The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) revealed the regional winners of this year's Best Tall Buildings. Every year, a jury panel of industry experts acknowledge new projects that have contributed majorly to the advancement of tall buildings and the urban environment. Achieving exemplary sustainability is also recognized. — 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

In our previous post, we published the four regional winners of the Best Tall Building prize conferred annually by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Winner of the award for the Middle East & Africa region is the five-building Sowwah Square complex in Abu Dhabi designed by Chicago architecture firm Goettsch Partners and developed by Mubadala Real Estate & Infrastructure. — bustler.net

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has announced the four regional winners in the race for the title Best Tall Building Worldwide 2013. The top regional towers include The Shard in London (Winner Europe); CCTV in Beijing (Winner Asia and Australia); Sowwah Square in Abu Dhabi (Winner Middle East and Africa); and The Bow in Calgary (Winner Americas). — bustler.net

Adrian Smith, senior Design Partner at Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture in Chicago, is the 2011 winner of the Lynn S. Beedle Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat for his extraordinary contribution to the supertall building typology. — bustler.net