Statistics cited by the Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats (CTBUH) continue to disprove recent predictions that developers have not lost interest in super-tall skyscrapers after the 110-story World Trade Center towers collapsed in New York. Only in 2010, 66 buildings with a height of more than 200 m opened their doors, breaking the record in 2007 (the pre-crisis year!), When there were 48 of them. Hypothetically placed one on top of the other, these 66 towers go up 16.8 km! Eight of them exceed 300 m, and the most significant contribution to the total length was, of course, the Burj Khalifa (828 m) tower in Dubai, which opened in January 2010, designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill.
Analysts estimate that 85% of super skyscrapers are concentrated in Asia and the Middle East. 2011, apparently, will not be an exception: 5 of the 10 tallest buildings in the world, which are being realized at the moment, are located in China and only one in the United States: the "Freedom Tower" SOM in New York's World Trade Center. True, of the same ten, six were designed by American architects. So, the 632-meter Shanghai Tower, developed by Gensler, may become the second tallest skyscraper after Burj Khalifa. In December 2010, the first 10 of its 128 floors were built; the building is planned to open in 2014. According to experts, not differing in general by strict control over the state of the environment, the Chinese advertise high-rise buildings as exemplary "green" buildings. The Shanghai Tower, for example, will generate energy from wind turbines and collect rainwater and use up 35% less resources than a typical office building.
In terms of their functional content, such skyscrapers usually connect residential and commercial areas, although, according to analysts, the main driver of high-rise construction in China is still a lack of housing for an ever-growing population. The latter, meanwhile, forces designers to look for new opportunities to load such buildings of many thousands. Thus, up to 90% of the 25,000 population of the 116-storey Chow Tai Fook Center in Guangzhou, which is being built according to the Kohn Pedersen Fox project, will arrive by public transport. For this, the tower is literally erected over three projected metro lines and has a tunnel connection with the existing suburban railway on the Pearl River. Similarly, the 115-storey Ping An International Finance Center office tower in neighboring Shenzhen, which was also designed by KPF architects, is also "connected" to the railway network.
China, by the way, tops the list for the number of super skyscrapers completed in 2010: 21 out of 66 (with three of them in the top five). But still, the tallest building currently under construction, possibly, will appear in Mumbai - this is the 720-meter India Tower designed by Norman Foster, which is going to be built by 2016.
Following China in terms of the number of high-rise buildings is the Middle East (14 out of 66): here records are not set because of overcrowding, but rather out of a desire to assert national identity, says Gary Haney, partner at Skidmore Owings & Merrill's New York office. In March, the bureau opens its next skyscraper - the 77-storey Al-Hamra Tower in Kuwait. But in the United States, according to analysts, the construction of skyscrapers, on the contrary, is declining, accounting for only 9% of buildings completed in 2010 (for comparison, in 2009 it was 21%). Of these, only the 249-meter Legacy tower in Milennium Park in Chicago entered the top twenty.
Despite the record pace of skyscraper building last year, the global crisis still affected this area, suspending or even canceling a number of ambitious projects, from the 91-story Dubai Towers in Doha, designed by RMJM, to the 84-story building. Faros de Panama in Panama. The victim of the crisis was the Fordham Spire of Santiago Calatrava in Chicago, which promised to become the world's tallest residential building.
