edifice complex

INSIDE

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SUPERTALL

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What skyscrapers reveal about the countries that build them

The world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai

Image: Stéphane Compoint

Sep 20th 2024

A skyscraper is a statement of ambition. No surprise, then, that Saudi Arabia wants to build the world’s tallest. Construction on the Jeddah Tower stopped in 2018 but will restart soon; when completed, it will be the first building ever to rise to a dizzying 1,000 metres. The Jeddah Tower’s nearly 170 storeys will house the usual combination of luxury flats, hotel rooms and offices. On one side visitors will be able to gaze on a new financial district; on another, across the Red Sea.

The building may cost around $1.2bn, but that is a trifling sum given the more than $1trn that Saudi Arabia is spending on developing infrastructure, luring tourists and repositioning itself on the global stage. Leaders see the tower, which resembles a jagged splinter of glass, as a symbol of the kingdom’s power. It “sends a financial and economic message that should not be ignored”, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who is overseeing the project, has said.

If that is the case, other places are sending out similar steely messages. There are 236 “supertall” buildings across the world—a label given to anything bigger than 300 metres—and 160 of them have been erected since 2014, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), a research group. Another 96 are under way. These hulking piles reshape skylines and cities. And, as well as reaching skyward, they point towards geopolitical and cultural trends. Which countries are building supertalls, and why?

Midtown Manhattan in 1955, looking downtown towards the Empire State Building, then the tallest building in the world Image: Getty Images

The Middle East is home to 20% of all supertalls. The United Arab Emirates, like Saudi Arabia, is showing off its oil wealth and status as one of the region’s fastest-growing economies. It has 35 supertalls; Dubai alone boasts 31, more than any other city. Its behemoth is the Burj Khalifa, which, at 828 metres, has been the world’s tallest tower since opening in 2010. (Reportedly only 71% of the Burj Khalifa is usable space; the rest is “vanity height”.)

Asia has a great love of heights, too, having built more than two-thirds of all supertalls in the past decade. A recent addition is Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, which was completed last year. At 679 metres tall, it pushed its way into second place. China, which had barely any skyscrapers before 1980, now has five of the ten tallest. The country is home to more skyscrapers per person than America. Some 70% of the supertalls under construction are going up in China. Twenty-five of them, if completed, will rank among the world’s top 100 tallest buildings.

China’s upward trajectory has practical causes. Until recently, the country’s population was surging, rising from 980m in 1980 to 1.4bn today. And those seeking work are still moving from the countryside to the cities, where 66% of people live. Height also helps with urban density, making commuting distances shorter.

But politics provides additional motivation for city planners to think big. “Officials in small cities are particularly prone to build tall,” says Jason Barr, an economist and the author of the book “Cities in the Sky: The Quest to Build the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers”. Strivers in the Communist Party see supertalls as a way to put their lower-tier cities on the map—and perhaps gain attention from central-government bigwigs.

Only 10% of supertalls built in the past decade have sprung up in America, the ancestral home of the skyscraper. (The first were built in New York and Chicago in the late 1880s.) New York, a city known for its gigantic buildings, has gained a few, including super-thin towers south of Central Park in a cluster nicknamed “Billionaires’ Row”. There are still many economic incentives to go high, particularly in New York: land is expensive, and its population is among the most concentrated of any American city. But gaining approval for new buildings is a complex process, thanks to 3,300 pages of zoning regulations.

The 100 tallest buildings

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New height record

The number of storeys may be soaring, but some countries nevertheless prefer to stay closer to the ground. In the European Union only Poland has a supertall building (Britain, an ex-member, has one too: the Shard). Skyscrapers are often regarded as “gauche” on the continent, says Daniel Safarik of CTBUH. In London and Rome new edifices are not allowed to block views of certain landmarks, making it hard to build upwards. Paris has banned construction of new tall buildings in response to “ugly” skyscrapers. On X one French person called the Montparnasse Tower, a Brutalist building from 1973, the greatest affront to Paris since the Nazi occupation.

When designing a supertall, architects must not have their heads in the clouds. The first serious order of business is to make sure the building does not get buffeted or blown over. “Wind is the governing factor” of supertall design, says Gordon Gill, who co-designed the Jeddah Tower. As buildings go up and up, so do wind forces. Engineers calculated that the Burj Khalifa, for instance, needed to be able to stand tall amid winds of 150mph (240kph), equivalent to a strong tornado.

The proposed Xi’an Greenland Tower in Xi'an, China, draws inspiration from the detailed armour of terracotta soldiers from the Qin dynasty Image: Adrian Smith, Gordon Gill Architecture

To avoid a statement of grandeur becoming a parable of ineptitude, architects have to “confuse” the wind using different shapes. Thinness, tapering, twisting, round edges and cut-outs at the top of the building all help, and there are interior as well as exterior solutions. At 432 Park Avenue in New York, five double-floors are left empty to let the wind pass through. Taipei 101 in Taiwan features a steel pendulum, weighing some 728 tonnes, that swings to counteract wind-induced movement.

Given the role of skyscrapers as symbols, architects must also pay close attention to what they look like. Note that the Woolworth Building in New York, the tallest in the world from 1913-30, has a copper roof and gargoyles to reflect its status as a “cathedral of commerce”. Today those commissioning supertalls, particularly in Asia and the Middle East, want the building to stand for cultural confidence as well as a specific sense of place.

432 Park Avenue in New York and Taipei 101
Image: Getty Images, Bridgeman, Alamy

Mr Gill says he consults historians to learn about relevant symbolism: for the façade of the proposed Greenland Tower in Xi’an, he evoked the armour of the terracotta soldiers of the ancient Qin dynasty. The spiral shape of Israel’s first supertall, currently under construction in Tel Aviv, recalls a biblical scroll. Merdeka 118 looks rather like a syringe, but its design was supposedly inspired by the shape of Tunku Abdul Rahman’s hand, evoking the statesman who proclaimed Malaysian independence in 1957.

The proposed 1 Park Avenue in the port city of Dubai, UAE (top) was designed to symbolise the motion of water. The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (bottom left), were meant to evoke the Islamic architecture of South Asia like the Qutb Minar, an 800-year-old minaret in Delhi, India (bottom right). Image: Alamy, Getty Images, Adrian Smith, Gordon Gill Architecture

The sky is not the only limit for supertalls. Enterprising countries all want spectacular buildings, at least until they decide they have had enough. China’s officials are clamping down on “weird” buildings. Edifices that look like “giant trousers”—the nickname given to a building in Beijing designed by Rem Koolhaas—are now verboten. In 2021 the government imposed a height cap of 500 metres and banned cities with fewer than 3m residents from building above 250 metres. (It is thought that safety problems, an oversupply of commercial offices and lots of vacant residential buildings motivated this policy.)

More engineering breakthroughs are needed, too, if buildings are to go higher. It was elevator innovations that helped set off skyscrapers in the late 1800s. But Adrian Smith, one of the architects on the Burj Khalifa, says that lift technology has long been a limiting factor. Existing steel cables have a travel distance of around 500 metres, meaning that it is not possible to get a single lift to the top of many supertalls. (Wind also puts extra strain on the cables.) Yet multiple banks of lifts are difficult to fit into tall, thin buildings. The Jeddah Tower will instead use carbon-fibre, a lighter material that can take lifts higher.

If and when it is possible for buildings to rise higher, no doubt some tycoon or tyrant will want to start a mile-high club. Supertall buildings are monuments to human ingenuity and modernity. But most of all, as Mason Cooley, an American humorist, put it, “A skyscraper is a boast in glass and steel.” ■

The Burj Al Arab in Dubai, UAE, which recalls the sail of a dhow, a common Arab sailing vessel Image: Getty Images

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “The edifice complex".