Lust for Height
By Philip Nobel
Friday, February 23, 2007

The Burj Dubai, slated to be the tallest building in the world when it’s done in 2009, is rising 160 stories or more (the final height is a secret) in the desert. It’s no anomaly. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 seem to have whetted the global appetite to build taller and taller. Most of the new mega-skyscrapers are in Asia and the Middle East, but the engineers and architects are American. Why the boom? A combination of economic imperatives and powerful egos, both national and personal. Coming soon: the fulfillment of Frank Lloyd Wright’s dream of a mile-high building.
In October, at the premier international conference of skyscraper builders, the first speaker announced without a hint of irony or doubt that by 2030, somewhere, a mile-high skyscraper would be built. Five thousand two hundred and eighty feet. One-tenth of the way to the ozone layer. More than three times as tall as anything now stand ing and exactly as high as the most fantastic towers ever dared conceived.

When the speaker made this prediction, there was no murmur of dissent from his colleagues, not a single snicker. Nor was David Scott, an accom plished engineer and the chairman of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, hustled off the stage and gently dosed back to a normative view of what can be achieved by mortals. The 750 planners, designers, and technicians in the room met his statement with a shrug—not, it seemed, because Mr. Scott had lost the thread, not because they were jaded by the repetition of an ancient dream (mile-high towers were proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1950s and by Norman Foster in the 1980s) but because what he said was so obvious, so attain able. For many years it has been a commonplace in the profession that no impediments to such heights exist: the technologies are waiting for the money and the willing client.

Indeed, sitting there in rows, a half-story below ground in an auditorium on the Chicago campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, were the very people who could build a tower one mile high: the foundation engineers who already knew how to pin such a thing to the earth, the structural engineers who could keep it standing in a 100-year wind, the architects who would give it form, the contractors who would know how to phase the behemoth’s con struction—even the guys who would have to figure out how to wash the windows. And there are going to be a lot of windows.

Welcome to Babel. The language is English, the units are metric, the know-how is mostly American, and the site is anywhere in the world where money, land, and opportunity converge, catalyzed by opti mism—personal, corporate, or national. Five years after September 11, well into what was expected to be the post-skyscraper era, a boom of increas*ingly improbable proportions is underway and it shows no signs of abating. Like a bar graph mea suring increased faith in the future, the towers keep getting taller—after lingering for decades around 1,400 feet, the height now needed to achieve a jaw-dropping wow-factor is approaching 2,000 feet—and all the biggest are clustered far from the building type’s familiar centers in North America.

“Everyone I know flies from Dubai to Tokyo to Shanghai to Hong Kong to Taipei,” says Carol Willis, an architectural historian and founder of New York’s Skyscraper Museum. “They’re almost never home.”

The current “world’s tallest” titleholder, the 101-story tower completed in Taipei in 2004, stands at a sinister 1,666 feet. When it is completed in 2008, the Lotte World II Tower in Busan, South Korea, will edge seven feet higher. The Burj Dubai, an epochal construction, stands now at about 1,000 feet with only 90 of its planned 160-plus stories completed; when it is finished in 2009, it may top out at over 2,600 feet—however, just as in the great Manhattan skyscraper race of the late 1920s (which the Chrysler Building won with its extended spire before being dwarfed in 1931 by the Empire State Building), the true planned height is a closely guarded secret. The Burj Dubai’s lead architect, Adrian Smith (until recently with the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill but now doing busi ness as Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture), says that as soon as the final number is announced, a competing developer in Dubai will release plans for an even higher tower. A building down the Emirates coast in Doha, to be completed next year, will likely make little news: at 1,460 feet, it is a baby—only ten feet taller than the Sears Tower, which, with 108 floors, has been the tallest building in the United States for the last 33 years and is now (but for not much longer) the third-tallest in the world.

More at: http://www.american.com/archive/2007/january-february-magazine-contents/0116-lust-for-height

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