Shanghai: The World’s Tallest Skyscraper?

February 16 2003 (FriedlNet.com) - Ready to reach for the stars and longing to show the world that it will be the city par excellance of the new millennium, Shanghai is resuming construction on tallest starscraper on the planet, bound to be even taller than the current record holders, the 452 meter tall Petronas Towers towering over Kuala Lumpur. But efforts to build the world’s tallest building via another symbolic tower of money and power just might be dashed by New York’s severed soul and its quest to not forget the intricacies and extremities of human nature – the two final project designs for the area where the embers of the smoldering World Trade Center ruins once lay both envision a building higher than anything else man has seen…

Just this Thursday construction resumed on the Shanghai World Financial Centre, which the developers – Japan’s Mori Building Company – wants to make the tallest building in the world. Mori, which currently manages the Senmao Building in Dalian and the HSBC Tower in Shanghai, wants to add 7 stories on to the initial design, which would make the tower 492 meters tall with 101 floors above the ground. With a total floor area of 377,300 square meters, the company will pump an additional 25 billion yen ($206 million) into the project. According to Dow Jones, investment of the 34 companies in the building consortium totals about 100 billion yen ($829 million). 2007 should see the tower completed.

Initially, construction on the project began way back in 1997, but the Asian Financial Crisis poked a hole in the local property bubble by blasting many Asian companies’ accounts, laying bare mountains of debt that brought construction of the project to a screeching halt. A gaping hole in the ground remained, waiting to be filled with floors of steel, glass, glitz, and glamour.

Now it seems the yen are rolling again: “Our goal is to build the tallest tower in the world,” Mori said this Thursday. At 492 meters, the building would be 40 meters higher than the Petronas Towers in Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur, the tallest pair of buildings in the world at present. Most of the new tower will be office space, though 10 floors near the top will hold a hotel. “Nothing less than the world’s tallest building is suitable for Shanghai’s ambitions,” said Lu Yongji, a professor of city planning at Shanghai’s Tongji University, according to the Associated Press.

However, controversy still remains with respect to the design of the tower, with a circular hole through the pinnacle being dangerously reminiscent of the Japanese flag. Chinese are very touchy on the subject, given Japanese-induced bloodsheds such as the Nanjing Massacre in 1939 (where 300,000 Chinese are thought to have perished) and the Nazi-like medical experiments that were conducted on residents of China’s northern provinces during the Japanese invasion prior to World War II.

The new skyscraper will be built right next door to another one of the Middle Kingdom’s mega-towers, the 420-meter architectural curiosity, the Jin Mao Tower. Finished in 1999, Jin Mao has become Shanghai’s landmark building. It is the China’s tallest and the world’s 3rd tallest, with the upper 25 floors being occupied by the ritzy Hyatt hotel. The tower has an occupancy rate of 80% and costs 1 million RMB per day to operate.

Of the world’s 10 tallest buildings, one is located on the mainland, one on Taiwan (the 348 meter T&C Tower in Kaohsiung), and 3 in Hong Kong (Central Plaza, the Bank of China Tower, and Central Station).

In the race to the top, the Shanghai ambitions just might be overshadowed by what’s going on next door in Taiwan. A building dubbed Taipei 101 (named after the number of floors) is currently being constructed in the island’s capital and will be completed next year, then being home to the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Soaring 508 meters into the sky, it would become the tallest building on the planet – for a while at least, provided the current series of bad omens comes to a halt. Last spring, an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale hit the island about 100 miles to the east of the construction site and caused 2 cranes to fall off the top of the building, killing 5. And just last month a fire broke out on the 10th floor.

Not daunted by the smaller island’s ambitions, Bloomberg quoted Mori as saying: the height of Taipei 101 is “achieved with a huge antenna right at the top. We can also add a couple of antennas.”

But all projects could be dwarfed by what New York has in store. At the beginning of this month, New York officials announced they had selected two finalists to design a site in commemoration of the World Trade Center and those who perished with it. The WTC was destroyed on September 11th 2001 after being struck by 2 airliners hijacked by terrorists, killing 2,800 people. Both proposals would give rise to buildings taller than all Asian projects currently underway.

A proposal by Berlin-based architect Daniel Libeskind envisions a very symbolic tower of 1,776 feet (541 meters) in height, to the inch. It would stand “as eloquent as the Constitution itself, asserting the durability of democracy and the value of individual life.”
The second final design selected by New York authorities is one drawn up by a team called THINK. The team sees a 640-meter high World Cultural Center soaring into the heavens, dwarfing all other worldly endeavors to date: “the response of a civilized world to the absurdity of evil.”

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