by Zach Mortice
Assistant Editor

Summary: The event horizon of high-rise development in emerging nations is rapidly accelerating to an unpredictable pace. In such places, where construction is cheap and real estate on par with top American markets, builders can afford to splurge on ambitious design and be appropriately rewarded. This boom is capturing the same desires and aspirations that fueled America’s 20th century skyscraper dominance, albeit with an emphasis on personal ownership and mixed-use design.

Like Cesar Pelli and Associates’ Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur before it, the 1,667-foot-tall Taipei 101 by C.Y. Lee and Partners will have an equally brief reign as the world’s tallest building. At least half a dozen projects from Chicago to Dubai are intent on humbling Taipei 101 in their shadow. Some of these projects might never be completed, and no one can really say what will be the world’s next tallest building for any length of time. The only safe bet is that it won’t be built in America.

The recent skyward explosion of high-rise development in developing nations (China, India, Dubai) has taken America’s previously undisputed mantle of builder of the best and tallest. Certainly, the urge to build to the stars is primordial. But only recently has what author and New York City-based architect James Sanders calls the “force-multiplier” of the American media translated this urge into a symbol of modernity itself through its invasive marketing of modern cityscapes to the rest of the world. “The meaning of these buildings got transferred from what they were to being a symbol of what it means to be a modern civilization,” he says. “[Developing nations] are sort of desperate to prove that they are players and powers in the global contemporary world.”

One hundred sixty-story cloud-piercers don’t get built anywhere without deep pockets willing to take risks, and developing nations have been thickening this capitalist-investor class. China’s GDP has multiplied by a factor of nearly 10 in the past 15 years. Dubai’s population has doubled since 1993.

Mixed-use high rises, your own piece of the sky
Though most of these projects are beyond American borders, the usual champions of American high-rise architecture (SOM, KPF, etc.) are getting the business. With their thick portfolios, they’re the most reliable choice, regardless of locality. “You need to buy experience,” says Carol Willis, an architecture historian and founder of the New York City Skyscraper Museum.

FXFowle is one such international player. They established a representative office in Dubai about a year ago. Peter Weingarten, AIA, FXFowle’s director of international architecture, says many of his clients are interested in the energy-efficient aspects of high-density vertical development. One such project is FXFowle’s India Tower in Mumbai, which uses a solar chimney to generate electricity, provides on-site wastewater reclamation, and is LEED®-Gold certified. Without the current climate of rampant and volatile high-rise development, the silver 85-story tower would be universally recognized as India’s next tallest building, but now, Weingarten says, not even this visionary project can claim the subcontinent with any great certainty.

Weingarten’s vision of India Tower’s transformative potential is emblematic of developers in many emerging nations. “It will have a much more intangible effect than just another big building, and then it will spur more development around it,” he says. “It becomes a magnet and a center, and if enough of these dots start to get created and they start to become connected into a network, you can really start to see some dramatic changes in the landscape of Mumbai and India.”

But, Weingarten says, such fantastic projects are really just an outlier. The real boom filling up foreign skylines are coming from the now commonplace and unheralded 60-some-story buildings rising up in dozens of cities.

No glut of projects
Still, there is no glut of these projects and no glut of architects willing and able to make them. “Any architect or engineer who is not really busy is dead,” says Leslie Robertson, Hon. AIA, whose structural engineering firm LERA is working with architect KPF on the 1,614-foot-tall Shanghai World Financial Center. Demand for the exorbitantly expensive residence units that make many of these projects is just as frenzied. The units in the 162-story, 2,651-foot-tall Burj Dubai (the most likely bet for the world’s tallest building) sold out in three days.

It’s a new situation for the world’s tallest buildings to be available for residential purchase, but many new super-tall developments are planned for mixed-use and not traditional commercial office space. Sanders says this transition is fueled by the growing globe-trotting elite that is hungry for the affectation of being able to describe their address as “the tallest building in the world.” For them, this is a chance literally to buy into to the symbolic value of the modern skyscraper.

In Dubai and other cities where high-rise development races ahead of everything else, mixed use is the best way to create neighborhoods that are socially sustainable and livable. “In Dubai, where [skyscrapers] are coming out of the ground and the follow-up development is a couple of years behind, [developers] need to create a synergy in this place now,” says Weingarten. “The way they can do that is by creating a mixed-use community.”

Skyscraper of the week
The extravagant designs streaming out of Hong Kong, Busan, and Mecca also depart with tradition in terms of construction costs. Santiago Calatrava’s spiraling 150-floor Chicago Spire notwithstanding, developing nations can afford to be more cavalier with building design because they often have much lower labor and construction costs, yet are able to sell these spaces at real estate prices comparable to the U.S. market. So far, this climate has rewarded experimentation, and building heights are accelerating towards the stratosphere. Certainly, some of these projects will collapse under their own weight before they are even built. “Designing them is easy,” says Willis. “Actually constructing them in a market is difficult.”

In a counterintuitive way, this race to the top might negate the fundamental attraction of building the tallest structure. If “the tallest building in the world” changes with the tides, Sanders wonders, “What does it mean anymore if no one can keep up with it?”