China usurps US as king of the skyscraper

THE 121-storey Shanghai Tower is more than China’s next record-setting building: It is an economic lifeline for the elite club of skyscraper builders.

Financial gloom has derailed plans for new towers in Chicago, Moscow, Dubai and other cities.

But in China, work on the 632-metre 2,074-foot Shanghai Tower, due to be completed in 2014, and dozens of other tall buildings, is rushing ahead, powered by a buoyant economy and providing a steady stream of work to architects and engineers.

The US high-rise market is “pretty much dead”, said Dan Winey, a managing director for Gensler, the Shanghai Tower’s San Francisco-based architects.

“For us, China in the next 10 to 15 years is going to be a huge market.”

China has six of the world’s 15 tallest buildings — compared with three for the United States, the skyscraper’s birthplace — and is constructing more at a furious pace, defying worries about a possible real estate boom and bust.

It is on track to pass the US as the country with the most buildings among the 100 tallest by a wide margin.

“There are cities in China that most Western people have never heard of that have bigger populations and more tall buildings than half the prominent cities in the US,” said Antony Wood, executive director of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

China is leading a wave of skyscraper building in developing countries that is shifting the field’s centre of gravity away from the United States and Europe.

India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia have ultra-tall towers under construction or on the drawing board.

In the Gulf, Doha in Qatar and Dubai, site of the current record holder, the 163-storey Burj Khalifa, each has three buildings among the 20 tallest under construction, though work on all but one of those has been suspended. North America’s share of the 100 tallest buildings will fall from 80% in 1990 to just 18% by 2012.