Ambitions towering to the heavens

There is nothing built or planned in China that will rival Dubai's 828-metre Burj Khalifa, but the dragon economy is already home to 32 of the world's 100 tallest buildings, as well as six of the 10 tallest under construction.

Ping An International Finance Centre will be the world's second-tallest building when completed in 2015. Nelson Ching / Bloomberg

Take a trip up to the 88th-floor observatory of Shanghai's Jin Mao Tower, completed in 1999, and the views are spectacular. Far below, the Huangpu River snakes through the city, and beside it is the space-age Oriental Pearl Tower, a symbol of Shanghai's brash modernity and once China's tallest building.

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While the viewing deck in the 421-metre-tall Jin Mao offers an impressive panorama, what is truly dizzying is the fact that just next door stands a skyscraper that reaches even higher.

The Shanghai World Financial Center was completed in 2008, and its 101 floors add up to a height of 492 metres, making it the fourth-tallest building in the world.

Amazing enough. But something even taller is sprouting nearby. Workmen are crafting the Shanghai Tower, which when completed in 2014 will reach 632 metres.

Manhattan's 1930s towers captured the imagination, but the centre of gravity of tall building construction, as with wider economic activity, is shifting east, and China is the prime mover.

"The growth of buildings in China … is an attempt to show China has the ability to build and engineer extremely complicated structures and to build cities that are bigger and more modern than anything the world has seen," says Jason Carlow, an associate member of the Hong Kong Institute of Architectswho is researching a book on high-rise buildings.

There is nothing built or planned in China that will rival Dubai's 828-metre-tall Burj Khalifa, but China is already home to 32 of the world's 100 tallest buildings, as well as six of the 10 tallest under construction.

Among them is the Ping An International Finance Centerin Shenzhen. At 660 metres, it will overtake the Shanghai Tower to become the world's second-tallest building when completed in 2015.

China's entry into the tall-building superleague follows a regional construction spree in which Malaysia claimed the world's tallest building title in 1998 with the twin Petronas Towers, only to lose the crown in 2004 to Taiwan and its Taipei 101 tower.

Now other Asian economies are getting in on the act, with South Korea and Indonesia having towers more than 600 metres tall on the drawing board, although no one has anything to match Saudi Arabia's proposed 1km-tall Kingdom Tower.

As skyscrapers grow ever taller, the engineering challenges, and therefore the costs, increase disproportionately. Fortunately, the revenues such buildings can generate, assuming the economic climate remains benevolent, also grow as storeys are added.

"Developers like to use these skyscrapers as a trademark. A prestigious skyscraper is good for publicity and can increase the price that the developer can charge, both in that particular building and in the buildings clustered around it," Dennis Poon, the vice chairman of the structural engineering company Thornton Tomasetti, said in an interview published last month.

Mr Poon knows what he is talking about, since he was involved in the structural design of Taipei 101 and is involved with the under-construction Shanghai Tower.

Yet it is tempting to ask whether too much is happening too fast, especially in China, where there are already signs the high-flying property market could be heading for a hard landing. December was the fourth month in a row in which average property prices in the country fell.

What is more, it is not just China's "first-tier" cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou that are building ultra-tall office, residential and hotel towers. The likes of Chongqing, Chengdu and Wuhan are also getting in on the act.

Wuhan's 118-storey, 606-metre-tall Greenland Center is scheduled for completion in 2015, and if everything goes to plan, it will be the world's fourth-tallest building at the time. All this in an inland city that relatively few people outside China have even heard of.

Mr Carlow, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong's faculty of architecture whose forthcoming book will focus on high-rise residential towers in the special administrative region, is, however, not overly concerned.

Developers, he says, "are generally very savvy", although he cautions that there is a risk of going too far.

"Most of the time there's a formula to what they're doing," he says. "At least for the time being, the market in China and other parts of East Asia will support that, although whether that can be sustained in the long run is another question.

"As buildings become more extreme, the sustainability of them financially and economically becomes riskier."

The fact that China is not looking to craft a tower to rival the Burj Khalifa indicates developers are keeping their ambitions in check, even if in engineering terms a mile-high tower is now believed to be possible.

It is also clear that Asia, and China in particular, has many of the high-density supercities for which tall buildings are designed.

In such contexts, experts regard ultra-tall buildings as offering lifestyle benefits when the towers are linked to public transport and include a good mix of work, retail and leisure, all easily accessible on foot. They offer benefits compared with out-of-town developments that can be reached only by car or public transport.

Just as more tall buildings are sprouting in Asia, so the continent is increasingly developing the expertise and know-how to design and engineer supertowers. Up to now it has often relied on architectural practices from the former king of the skyscraper, North America.

Beijing's CCTV tower, while not in the tall-building superleague, shows that China is prepared to craft innovative buildings of the kind that may help to stimulate the creativity of the country's own designers.

"There are multinational firms like [the engineers] Arup with offices in China that are staffed primarily with Chinese engineers," Mr Carlow says. "They're definitely catching up. It's just a matter of time before Chinese architects will be building all over the world, and we're already seeing that to some extent."

But with ominous signs that China's property bubble will burst, the local experts' new-found ambitions may be kept in check by economic realities.

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