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THE 121-story Shanghai Tower is more than China's next record-setting building: it's an economic lifeline for the elite club of skyscraper builders, writes Joe McDonald.
Financial gloom has derailed plans for new towers in Dubai, Chicago, Moscow and other cities. But in China, work on the 632-metre 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', according to 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 US, 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, which is shifting the field's centre of gravity away from the US 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-story Burj Khalifa, each has three buildings among the 20 tallest under construction, though work on all but one of those has been suspended.
The shift is so drastic that North America's share of the 100 tallest buildings will fall from 80 per cent to just 18 per cent by 2012, according to Wood. He said by then, 45 of the tallest will be in Asia, with 34 of those in China alone.
"So 34 per cent of the 100 tallest buildings will be in a single country. That has only happened once before, and that was with the US," he said.
In China, skyscrapers are going up in obscure locales such as Wenzhou, Wuhan and Jiangyin, a boomtown north of Shanghai, which is building a 72-story, 328-metre hotel-and-apartment tower that will be taller than Manhattan's Chrysler Building.
China's edifice complex is driven by a mix of demand for space in a crowded country with economic growth forecast at 10 per cent this year and local leaders who want architectural eye candy to promote their cities as commercial centres.
Dozens of midsize Chinese cities are building new business districts to replace cramped downtowns. They look to the model of Shanghai's skyscraper-packed Pudong district - China's Wall Street - created in the 1990s on reclaimed industrial land.
"Governments are encouraging these iconic buildings in order to give a very clear message to the outside world: Please pay attention to our city," said Dennis Poon, managing principal of Thornton Tomasetti, the Shanghai Tower's structural engineers.
China has four of the 10 tallest buildings under construction, versus two for the US - and work on one of those, the 610-metre Chicago Spire, has stopped.
The Shanghai Tower will be China's tallest office tower, surpassing the neighboring Shanghai World Financial Centre (WFC) in Pudong. The two-year-old WFC passed the Jinmao Tower, also in Pudong, for the title.
China accounts for 65 per cent of Gensler's worldwide revenues from projects that involve buildings 35 to 40 storeys and above, according to Winey.
The firm is working on some 50 projects in China that total eight million square metres, the equivalent of San Francisco's entire stock of commercial office space, he said. China revenues are rising by 30 to 35 per cent a year and its staff of 140 people in offices in Beijing and Shanghai should expand to 500 in the next seven years.
The Shanghai Tower will have a double-layer glass exterior to insulate it and cut heating and cooling costs, an advanced feature that might be rejected as too costly to install in the US or other Western markets, according to Winey. "You can do a lot more experimentation here," he said.
