Tall & Urban News

History does not want for dizzying fantasies of tall buildings.

From the Tower of Babel onwards, humanity has dreamed of ever-more wondrous skyscrapers, whether we knew them by that name or not. In 1851 an architect called Charles Burton proposed that the glass and iron left over from the Great Exhibition be used to construct a tower 1,000 feet (305 meters) tall—just short of the height of The Shard.

Burton promised, as so many architects have since, that “there was never so favorable an opportunity of erecting so gigantic a tower at so comparatively trifling a cost.” His tower, complete with a vertical steam train in place of the as-yet-not-invented passenger lift, was never built, and nor were so many other hyper-ambitious structures designed between Burton’s time and ours.  

That category includes Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile High Illinois, which was proposed in 1956 and whose putative height was 50 percent greater than that of the Burj Khalifa, our modern-day tallest building (828 meters / 2,717 feet).  

It also includes the X-Seed 4000, a monstrous 4-kilometer-high (2.5-mile) pyramid envisioned for Tokyo and up to a million of its inhabitants in 1995, and the Dynamic Tower, a 388-meter (1,273-foot) skyscraper offered to Dubai in 2008, each of whose floors might have rotated 360 degrees in 180 minutes (much like Brazil’s Suite Vollard, which is real and does rotate).  

This eerie graveyard of unborn skyscrapers could yet welcome The Tulip, a bulbous-topped neighbour to The Gherkin. Its construction was blocked by Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, last year, although the building’s designers, the firm of the star British architect Norman Foster, have just begun their appeal.

So for each of the world’s 200-odd skyscrapers that are either supertall (300 meters / 984 feet) or megatall (600 meters / 1,968 feet) there are many more that were never built.  

These unrealized and often unworkable envisionings of the future of skyscrapers have usually been grandiose, sometimes grotesque, and always ambitious. But they are not half as strange or wonderful as the skyscrapers that might arise within our lifetimes.

2019 was a boom year for supertalls. Just before the turn of the year, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), a Chicago-based body that is generally considered the global authority on skyscraper height, released its annual review of global construction. The year 2019, it said, was “remarkable for the tall building industry, as it saw 26 supertall buildings completed… the most in any year.” Worldwide, we are constructing 15 times as many buildings of 200 meters (656 feet) height or more as we did in any year of the 1980s. “The appetite for especially tall buildings remains high,” the report concluded.

That report was issued on 12 December 2019. Four days later, health officials in Wuhan, a city home to three of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, began investigating an outbreak of the viral pneumonia that we now know as Covid-19. As we all know, the virus spread across the world, prompting national lockdowns whose economic consequences we have barely begun to suffer. Its many victims have included the travel sector and traditional white-collar working practices. Given that their tenants are mostly hotels and offices, this is bad news for skyscrapers.

“I’ve been in the commercial property market for 54 years,” says Tony Lorenz. “I’ve had four previous recessions” – he lists those of the mid-Seventies, early Eighties, early Nineties, and late Noughties—"and the bottom line is that I’ve never seen anything like this at all.”  

Lorenz, who runs a property consultancy of the same name in London, expects companies to cut their office space by around 20 percent. Although social distancing rules will force employers to give workers more personal space than before, those workers have by now developed a taste, and an aptitude, for working from home. The headquarters of big banks, such as HSBC and Barclays, dominate the skyline of Canary Wharf, and those buildings have been all-but vacant since March.  

Many banks, prompted by pre-Covid factors such as Brexit, were already reducing their London office space, and some of their leaders, such as the Barclays chief executive Jes Staley, have publicly questioned whether they need a single, large headquarters at all. Where employers once took 21-year leases on offices, Lorenz says, they now ask for 10-year leases with five-year break clauses. Big building projects require big loans, but tenant skittishness, which the pandemic will only increase, is hardly conducive to confidence.

According to Lorenz, businesses that might previously have jointly occupied a large building now want smaller premises of their own. “There's a lot more demand for the self-contained building,” says Lorenz, “whereby tenants can actually run their own HR.   

"They can run their own security and mix only with people they know, instead of being sneezed over by some stranger in a completely different business.”   

A global economic slowdown; social distancing; a crackdown on high rise-building in China. These are not supportive conditions for further boom years. Large building projects take years, sometimes decades, which means that the CTBUH’s annual completion figures might not include a commensurate drop for another couple of years, but the 2020s look likely to be a leaner decade for skyscraper construction than the last.  

None of this, however, amounts to an existential threat. Travel will return, and so will the office. “In the short run,” says Paul Cheshire, emeritus professor of economic geography at the LSE, “there will be substantial changes and major problems, but in the five-to-10 year horizon I think that things will revert to pretty much just as they were, with a few changes and more remote working.”

There is good evidence, he says, that the more densely an office area is populated, the more productive its work will be. In these “vertical agglomeration economies,” says Prof Cheshire, “it’s all a question of interactions between complementary skills and people. The problem with working remotely is that you don’t have accidental encounters.”

So the value of the sky-high office building will remain, and our reluctance to re-enter such buildings might vanish more quickly than we imagine. “You’ve got to remember,” says Herbert Wright, “that after 9/11, the biggest skyscraper disaster of the century so far, people said: ‘That’s the end of the skyscraper.’ And of course it wasn’t. It was actually the beginning of the biggest skyscraper boom ever, which is still going on around the world. Predictions of the end of the skyscraper have been made before and proved to be false."

Wright, who is the author of London High, a guide to the capital’s skyscrapers, thinks that the crisis might even be helpful for British supertall construction.  

Buildings in London must not exceed 300 meters (984 feet), a height exceeded by 15 skyscrapers in Manhattan alone. Within Canary Wharf, buildings must not exceed 235 meters (770 feet), a limit imposed because of the proximity of planes flying in and out of London City Airport. Should the aviation industry suffer so badly that the airport shuts, Wright muses, “you’ll be able to go to 300 meters."

There is no suggestion that London City Airport is under any more pressure than other airports, but the pandemic, as Wright suggests, might not be as deleterious for tall building construction as it seems. One way that this might happen is by decentralization—Lorenz says that London-based companies, seeking to create several regional hubs rather than hive all their employees in one location, are now looking at office space in cities including Manchester, Birmingham and Cardiff. And there may be skyscraper-friendly changes within the capital, too. Building regulations, for so long the chief obstacle to skyscraper construction in Britain and elsewhere, have rarely looked so vulnerable.

A densely historic city like London is riddled with planning hazards. The best-known of these are the “protected vistas," which are the views of landmark buildings such as St. Paul’s Cathedral from raised points such as Primrose Hill in Camden and Blackheath Point in Greenwich. In total, there are 13 protected views. Plot them on a map and they look tripwires.  

Architects must ensure that their plans do not violate these sightlines, which have been protected since 1938. Sometimes this leads to architectural creativity, notably in the design of one of the City’s newer skyscrapers, 122 Leadenhall Street. Better known as “the Cheesegrater," the building supposedly owes its distinctive wedge shape to its designers’ attempt to minimize their interference with the view of St. Paul’s from the west.

These views are popular with day-trippers and beloved of conservationists, but critics say they hold back development and contribute to the housing crisis. “You can only see St Paul’s from Richmond Park three days a year because of the haze and the rain,” says Prof Cheshire. 

London is not alone in governing its tall buildings in this way—San Francisco has protected views, and so do Portland, Vancouver and Edinburgh—and it is far from the most restrictive. European cities, which have centuries’-worth of elderly buildings to preserve, are far stricter than the great skyscraping cities of North America and Asia. Paris, for the sake of the Eiffel Tower, has a cap of 180 meters (590 feet) on new buildings—a limit that makes London look like Singapore. 

Where the UK really differs is that, within those rules, building plans are approved or denied on a discretionary basis. This way of doing things, says Prof Cheshire, “is incredibly specific and unusual. And it’s primarily unusual because it’s discretionary.” Here, he says, “it’s always a political decision. It’s taken by the local planning authority, so it’s a political decision, and subject, therefore, to lobbying and all sorts of comings and goings.” Think of the Tulip—felled by the mayor rather than precluded by the rules. 

The merit of this system is that appraising a potential skyline is a subjective matter. Some decisions, at least in theory, might be best made on a case-by-case basis. How could the architects of our planning laws have anticipated that their successors might have to deal with, in the Tulip, a tower compared to a sperm cell?

Then again, the rules-based French system, which has restrictions on design, finish and materials, might have quashed the plans immediately, without the years-long wrangling. This contrast makes discretionary planning, in the view of Prof. Cheshire, “just an extraordinarily inefficient way of running a planning system.”   

Ambitious building projects in London take years to get started, as Cheshire explores in a recent paper with Dr. Gerard Dericks, often require the services of glamorous and expensive trophy architects (e.g. Renzo Piano for the Shard and Norman Foster for the Gherkin) in order to woo politicians. Those politicians hear the sweet nothings of trophy architects in one ear and the chuntering of Nimbys in the other. “The shouts are usually loudest from those who feel that in some ways, a development is going to reduce the value of their house or make the city a worse place or something. The shouts are not from those who are going to benefit from it,” says Prof. Cheshire.

The pandemic might shake things up. The Government’s campaign to “Build, Build, Build,” which seeks to jump-start the economy by encouraging construction, has relaxed rules around demolishing vacant buildings, adding stories to pre-existing properties, and converting commercial buildings into housing.   

Further relaxations, perhaps of the discretionary planning system—“God, we can hope, can’t we?”, says Cheshire—could follow in Number 10’s planning policy paper, whose release is imminent, or in a White Paper later this year. It is unlikely that politicians will lay a finger on the Green Belt, the protected vistas, and the conservation areas. But a liberalizing of the discretionary planning system could make it easier to build skyscrapers here—and perhaps easier to build more characterful skyscrapers.

That’s how we often think of London’s newer skyscrapers: characterful. The Cheesegrater, the Gherkin, the Walkie-Talkie, and the Can of Ham are to some eyes carbuncular, but at the very least are more arresting than the cuboids of Canary Wharf. In this way London is part of a broader trend towards a spectacular diversification of skyscraper design—a trend that is well under way and which promises novel construction styles and eloquent displays of national pride.

As well as cracking down on megatalls, China’s rulers have outlawed the popular practice of building large replicas of Western landmarks such as the US Capitol and the Eiffel Tower, as well as banning the weirdly-shaped experimental skyscrapers that Western architects have brought to their public bodies and big businesses. What looks likely to follow is an urban typology that is less chaotic and imitative and more authentically Chinese—and one that will still involve tall buildings.  

Skyscrapers “have always been a way to put a place on a map,” says Judith Dupré, author of Skyscrapers: A History of the World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings.

Dupré—whose book, appropriately, is tall enough to reach an adult’s kneecap—says “they’ve always been a way to create national identity and national pride. And China, having been buffeted about by the pandemic and having had their national identity bruised, is saying: ‘No more copycat buildings. We are going to go back into our ancient and sophisticated culture. We’re going to go back to our own architectural and aesthetic groups and create our own constructed identities.’” 

Dupré cites the new generation of Chinese skyscrapers styled after pagodas, of which Taipei 101, completed in 1999, is a well-known early example. These are part of a worldwide trend for buildings that are not just tall, but which trumpet cultural heritage.  

Take the Makkah Royal Clock Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which looks a little like the Big Ben-housing Elizabeth Tower, but six times as tall (601 meters / 1,972 feet) and overlooking Mecca. Built to accommodate wealthy pilgrims and finished in 2012, the tower has the four largest clockfaces in the world, adorned with Islamic artwork and topped by a 35-tonne (38-ton) crescent moon.

The clocktower’s 21,000 flashing lights, visible from 18 miles away (28.9 kilometers) signal the time for prayer. The structure’s enormous height makes it the third-tallest skyscraper in the world, far outstripping other nationally-specific skyscrapers such as Dubai’s Burj al-Arab, which resembles the sail of an Arabian dhow ship. Then again, the Oblisco Capitale Tower, a mooted 1 kilometer (0.62 miles)-tall, Ancient Egyptial obelisk-inspired centerpiece for Egypt’s new administrative capital, would, should it ever be built, be taller than both of them put together. Such is the future of international skyscraper-building, a field in which it is no longer enough to be supertall.

Does this mean the end, then, of the glass-and-steel cuboid? Not really. For one, characterful alternatives such as those above are government-backed one-offs rather than the commercially-minded projects that comprise the majority of skyscraper-building.

They are arising not so much in the West, which has pre-existing grand architectural aesthetics, as in countries that are interested in using architecture to exhibit themselves globally. And the cuboid form has reached new levels of refinement, notably in the startlingly slender high-rises that are beginning to populate Manhattan. The slimmest of these is the Steinway Tower, also known as 111 West 57th Street. It is 435 meters (1,428 feet) tall and a mere 18 meters (60 feet) wide. These needle-style skyscrapers owe their existence partly to their designers’ creative use of small plots, and partly to advances in engineering.  

For more on this story, go to The Telegraph.