![]() “Governments are encouraging these iconic buildings in order to give a very clear message to the outside world: Please pay attention to our city,” said Dennis Poon, managing principal of Thornton Tomasetti, the Shanghai Tower’s structural engineers. They look to the model of Shanghai’s skyscraper-packed Pudong district - China’s Wall Street - created in the 1990s on reclaimed industrial land. It is building a 72-story, 1,076-foot (328-meter) hotel-and-apartment tower that will be taller than Manhattan’s Chrysler Building.Ĭhina’s edifice complex is driven by a mix of demand for space in a crowded country with economic growth forecast at 10 percent this year and local leaders who want architectural eye candy to promote their cities as commercial centers.ĭozens of midsize Chinese cities are building new business districts to replace cramped downtowns. In China, skyscrapers are going up in obscure locales such as Wenzhou, Wuhan and Jiangyin, a boomtown north of Shanghai. That has only happened once before, and that was with the USA,” he said. “So 34 percent of the 100 tallest buildings will be in a single country. He said by then, 45 of the tallest will be in Asia, with 34 of those in China alone. The shift is so drastic that North America’s share of the 100 tallest buildings will fall from 80 percent in 1990 to just 18 percent by 2012, according to Wood. In the Gulf, Doha in Qatar and Dubai - site of the current record holder, the 163-story Burj Khalifa - each has three buildings among the 20 tallest under construction, though work on all but one of those has been suspended. India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia have ultra-tall towers under construction or on the drawing board.
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