The British company that built the Shard skyscraper in London will manage the construction of the Kingdom tower in Saudi Arabia, which will be the world's tallest building when completed.

The Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal unveiled the plans, by American firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, 18 months ago as part of a new £13bn Kingdom City development on the Red Sea coast to the north of Jeddah. — guardian.co.uk

Canada’s biggest city is getting even bigger, with a pace-setting number of skyscrapers set to join the city skyline.

According to a Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) report dubbed “Canada Rising,” Toronto is leading the western world in terms of new buildings 150 metres or taller currently under construction. — DesignBuild Source Canada

The United Technologies Corp. unit has to go beyond the braking mechanism Elisha Otis demonstrated with a rope and saber at the 1854 World’s Fair. It’s working on systems able to stop 16 metric tons (35,274 pounds) of elevator and cable falling from the top of a kilometer-tall tower -- equal to a half-full tractor trailer driven off a cliff. — bloomberg.com

'[R]emember that a place like Dubai really emerged in the last 50 years. It was a sleepy, you know, Bedouin town half a century ago. And what you do is when you bring in the world’s, you know, most sophisticated architects and engineers, you can literally build anything, including a building of 140 or 150 stories. But designing a municipal network of sewage treatment is in some ways more complex. - KATE ASCHER — Boing Boing

The Park Avenue tower rises from a monumental covered plaza to two setbacks, where the 42-foot-high garden levels expose those massive, dramatic building supports. The top two floors of the tower, tentatively planned to rise 49 stories, form a glass- roofed garden. Elevator shafts morph into glowing blades that slice the sky above the roof. — bloomberg.com

In a bizarre dispute, a skyscraper has been built around a tombstone in the city of Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province in China.

Building developers bought a cemetery with an eye to building a series of skyscrapers on the land. Prior to construction, locals were paid to relocate the graves, yet one family refused the proposed terms, forcing developers to build around the landmass. — DesignBuild Source

A towering beacon of pink mirrored glass has overtaken the Shard to become the tallest building in Europe. Moscow's Mercury City tower, which topped out on Thursday, now rises to 339m, making it 29m taller than London's own crystalline pyramid.

The building joins a motley cluster in the emerging Moscow International Business Centre, a $12bn complex initiated by former mayor Yuri Luzhkov as a playground for rival oligarchs to demonstrate their penile might. — guardian.co.uk

Johnson, a design partner in the New York City office of architect NBBJ, estimates that by 2060-70, skyscrapers will not only produce more energy than they use, they will produce food. — enr.construction.com

For a Middle East-based client he's not allowed to identify, Johnson worked on a project back in the late 2000s designing a building that would have been a mile-and-a-half tall, with 500 stories. Somewhat of a theoretical practice, the design team identified between 8 and 10 inventions that would have had to take place to build a building that tall. Not innovations, Johnson says, but inventions, as in completely new technologies and materials. — theatlanticcities.com

The tower, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, will contain offices, exclusive residences, a luxury hotel, restaurants and a viewing gallery across 72 floors which can be occupied.

There are a further 15 levels which make up the 'spire' - six of which have the potential to be used, with another nine exposed to the elements.

The 1,016ft skyscraper was inaugurated by the prime minister and minister of foreign affairs of Qatar, Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jabr Al-Thani, and The Duke of York. — dailymail.co.uk

It took Dubai more than five years to build the 828-meter Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building (for the moment, anyway). But Chinese architects and engineers reckon they need a mere 90 days to leave the Emiratis in the dust. At least, that's what they've claimed. — cnngo.com

Swapping cement and steel for timber is the vision of a number of environmentally-minded architects who are planning high-rise buildings across the world.

Architect Michael Green has plans for a 30-story wooden skyscraper in Vancouver, while plans are afoot in Norway and Austria for 17- and 20-story buildings that use wood as the main building material, eschewing steel and concrete. — CNN.com

“There needs to be intensification,” argues architect Bruce Kuwabara. “What we have to think about are ways to create a vertical urban life that’s livable. It isn’t just about the view. It has to be about how buildings work at the base and how they contribute to the public realm.” — thestar.com

Any skyscraper is a contradiction.

The tall tower is architecture's most famous building type and also the one most clearly at odds with the profession's roots. Fundamentally, architecture is shelter, a concession that we're afraid to face the elements without protection. A skyscraper is vertical hubris. — latimes.com