World's Tallest Status Symbols

By MAGGIE FARLEY

Nov. 11, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

HONG KONG —

Call it Asia’s Edifice Complex.

Fueled by fast-growing economies, leaders with high hopes and billionaires with big egos, the continent is displacing the United States as the home of the world’s tallest towers. Once the base for the 10 highest buildings in the world, the United States can now claim only three: the Sears Tower, the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building.

The rest are in Asia, where, from China to Malaysia, builders are erecting super-tall towers to symbolize the region’s rising place in the world economy. Among them: a vanity tower sponsored by a miniskirted Hong Kong billionaire and a 105-story pyramid whose elevators don’t work.

Building the record-breaking skyscrapers is not easy or efficient. And the higher they go, the more expensive they are.

“As a good architect, I tell my clients it’s suicide,” says Yuheng Shang, whose firm, HLW International, designed a 1,693-foot tower to put the central Chinese city of Chongqing on the map. “It’s much more efficient to build two 44-story towers than one 88-floor one.”

So why do it? A survey of top designers and developers around the world showed that the most common reasons to reach for the sky are “self-advertising,” “ego” and “expression of identity.”

Psychoanalysts and architects alike cannot ignore the phallic symbolism of the towers of power.

“It’s like locker-room envy,” says Malaysian architect Kenneth Yeang. “It’s a matter of ‘Mine is bigger than yours.’ ”

American architect Cesar Pelli, who designed the current record-holder, the 1,483-foot Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, has a loftier explanation: “Very tall buildings touch us intimately, in deep chords of our psyche. It’s a very old human urge to point toward heaven.”

Over the ages, the tallest structures have traditionally been places of worship and triumphal monuments, and it is no accident that Pelli incorporated elements of both into the Petronas Towers. The twin towers’ bases are shaped like eight-sided Islamic stars; the spires suggest a mosque’s minarets. A dramatic “sky bridge” on the 41st and 42nd floors connects a conference room, a dining area and a chamber for prayer.

The building, which will be the headquarters of the state-run petroleum company, also houses Malaysia’s national ambitions. The towers have become the symbol of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s “20-20 Vision” campaign: a drive to make the nation fully developed technologically by 2020. A Malaysian architect reports that the prime minister has taken a special interest in the building and that he emphatically rejects rumors that it is beginning to lean.

The architect backs up Mahathir’s assessment: “It’s not tilting; it’s settling, and within an allowable limit.”

Leapfrog Into Future

While the towers represent Malaysia’s ambition to leapfrog into the future, from Third World to First World country, they also show a shift in dynamism from the West to the East.

When the Petronas Towers won the “world’s tallest” record from Chicago’s Sears Tower in March, the Windy City took the development hard. Although the Sears Tower’s 110 stories overshadow the Petronas’ 88-floor towers, judges from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat included the Malaysian building’s 242-foot spires in their calculations, which gave it a 29-foot height advantage.

“Spires count; antennas don’t,” says Lynn Beedle, director of the Council on Tall Buildings, which is based at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and created the height criteria. The guidelines state that measurements will be taken “from the sidewalk level of the main entrance to the structural top of the building, including penthouse and tower. Towers include spires and pinnacles. Television and radio antennas, masts and flagpoles are not included.”

Sears Tower officials conceded that its 64-foot radio antennas should not count but protested that the antennas’ steel bases should--which would give them 35 feet over the Petronas Towers.

“Chicago couldn’t get over it,” Beedle says. “But they still have the highest observation deck.”

The skyscraper is an American invention. The first tall buildings rose in Chicago before the turn of the century, and the height competition is as old as American cities’ soaring ambitions.

These towering symbols tap “a certain subconscious feeling of ‘How far can I reach?’ ” says Hong Kong psychotherapist Cathy Tsang-Feign, who has researched life in tall buildings and related topics.

Nina Kung Wang, the richest woman in Asia, wants to beat the big boys at their own game. The diminutive Hong Kong billionaire redrew the blueprints for a tower of her own after the Petronas Towers were begun to make sure hers would be taller. She redrew them again so that hers would exceed the planned 1,500-foot Shanghai World Financial Center. Now shooting for a structure 1,640 feet high, she is determined to snag the world record for a building she calls a monument to Hong Kong’s future after this capitalist paradigm’s 1997 takeover by Communist China.

Phallic competition may not be the force driving this woman who wears miniskirts and go-go boots and sports three long black braids. But as it is for her male counterparts, ego is undeniably a factor: Wang wants to call her building Nina Tower.

After her husband, Teddy, was kidnapped in 1990--he is believed dead by most people, but not Wang--she took over the family real estate company, Chinachem Group. Now her personal fortune is an estimated $3.3 billion, and she owns interests in more than 200 buildings in Hong Kong.

“I like being able to look up and say, ‘That’s my building,’ ” she told the Times of London.

Nina Tower, whose plans call for it to have a scalloped top reminiscent of New York’s Art Deco Chrysler Building, remains on the drawing board while Wang haggles over the location with the Hong Kong government. The current planned site, Hong Kong officials say, is in the flight path of the new airport that is scheduled to open in 1998, and would interfere with the radar system.

Unlike some other buildings-to-be, this one has no financing problem. When asked how she intends to pay for the $1-billion monument, Wang says simply: “Cash.”

While Wang worries about besting her rivals by a few feet, engineers say that the construction world is poised at the edge of a quantum leap in height. In 1956, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, best known for graceful, low-lying houses, designed a mile-high building--a little less than four times the height of today’s tallest structures. He envisioned the tower as a tripod, which he called the most stable of upright structures, with helicopter landing pads and atomic-powered elevators that would connect 528 floors.

Wright’s building was a futuristic folly 40 years ago, but as more and more technological restrictions are addressed, the mile-high tower seems less out of reach.

Among the last problems were the limitations of elevators. Buildings such as the Petronas Towers and Hong Kong’s Central Plaza (1,227 feet) use double-deck systems: Passengers ride halfway up the building in one set of lifts, then change to a second set at a “sky lobby” to improve traffic flows.

Elevators cannot travel much higher than they do now because the heavy steel cables can sustain their own weight only up to about 2,000 feet, says Alan Cheung of Otis Elevator Co.’s Hong Kong office. And adding more sky lobbies consumes too much of a structure’s core space, making the building too expensive.

One alternative might be a system inspired in part by Wright, who called elevators “upended streets.” Otis has created elevators that can move both horizontally and vertically. The shaft has “parking stations” to the side, so one lift can pass another if necessary. Otis is looking for a new super-high building where the company can test the system.

‘Re-Imagine the City’

Futurists predict that a shortage of urban space will force people into taller and taller buildings. Hong Kong, whose population is one of the most densely packed in the world, perhaps offers a glimpse of this future.

“You have to re-imagine the city,” says Tom Peters, a professor at Lehigh University’s Building and Architectural Technology Institute. “As soon as you build a very tall building, you have a city standing on end, and all the infrastructure and services that go along with it.”

That is another reason the super-tall buildings may not make economic sense, Peters says. The trash and sewage systems, fire services and transport required by 50,000 workers in a building and their 60,000 visitors--which Peters says is the average daily traffic at New York’s World Trade Center--need a lot of infrastructure.

“You may have to move outside an urban area to accommodate all of that,” Peters says, “but it’s self-defeating” to put up a super-tall building where there is plenty of land available.

And moving thousands of people in and out of one opening at the bottom doesn’t make sense, he adds. Until engineers can come up with access from the top or even from points along the way up--as in TV’s “The Jetsons,” where personal spaceships buzzed in and out of buildings--then the super-tall structures are irrational, Peters says.

Apart from the advertising value of having one of the world’s tallest buildings, it is rarely possible to make up the costs of constructing and maintaining these towers. So most are built, analysts say, when there is simply lots of money around.

Market analyst Christofer Rathke in Tokyo has put together an index showing that the highest skyscrapers of their day were built during stock market peaks. Rathke found that the three previous bull markets in the U.S. each topped out around the same time developers topped off record-breaking creations: the Singer Tower in 1906, the Chrysler Building in 1929 and the World Trade Center in 1966.

Still, stock markets may be beside the point in Asia today, because only billionaires and authoritarian governments can marshal the resources necessary to build such costly edifices.

This is true in China, which boasts five record-book buildings on the ground or the drawing board. The booming border town of Shenzhen, adjacent to Hong Kong, has the world’s 13th-tallest tower, the Shenning Square; the 14th-tallest, Sky Central Plaza, is in nearby Guangzhou. Planned for Chongqing, the up-and-coming city in central China, is the 1,693-foot Chongqing Tower, although plans have been put on hold indefinitely while the new mayor evaluates the costs.

In Shanghai, the 1,379-foot-high Jin Mao tower, designed by the American firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill--the same architects who designed the Sears Tower--is on its way up and scheduled to be finished in 1998. In 2001, it is expected to have a neighbor, the $1-billion Shanghai World Financial Center, to take the crown as the world’s tallest building.

Reaching skyward is a radical change for China, where power used to be expressed by horizontal space, points out Anthony King, an architecture and sociology professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton. The Forbidden City in Beijing, which housed the emperors and their retinue, sprawls over 250 acres. Nearby Tiananmen Square was built so that premiers could look out over some of their 1 billion people from a viewing platform.

As China’s market reforms and sheer size have made it a growing power in the global economy, its leaders have appropriated the skyscraper as a symbol of modernity and internationalism. These buildings, King says, are being used “as a magic wand stuck metaphorically in the terrestrial globe” to transform developing cities into modern metropolises.

Ironically, buildings intended to establish a city’s or nation’s or company’s identity often sacrifice cultural uniqueness to the idea of internationalism. While Shanghai may soon be the home of the world’s tallest building, there is an absence of chest-thumping among city fathers: The designers of the World Financial Center are American, the developers Japanese.

In turn, Minoru Mori, the billionaire Japanese developer, downplays the achievement. Japan’s frequent earthquakes make the island nation less than hospitable to super-tall buildings, so Mori took the opportunity offered by Shanghai officials.

“We wanted the challenge of building the highest building in the world,” he says in his art-laden Tokyo office. “It has a certain appeal, doesn’t it?”

In its plans for the World Financial Center, the American architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox is paying homage to a Shanghai landmark, the 1,535-foot-tall Oriental Pearl TV tower. Plunked in the middle of Pudong, the new special economic zone across the river from the city’s famous old European buildings, the tower--which opened in May 1995--was meant to represent Shanghai’s future.

It looks as if it was inspired by the cover of a 1950s science-fiction paperback, with a spire spearing two large red glass orbs and nine smaller ones. It is not universally acclaimed--one foreign businessman says his company moved its waterfront headquarters so the occupants wouldn’t have to look at it.

But it was designed and built by Chinese, and the government has stipulated that new buildings must not overshadow it. The World Financial Center will be tall enough to claim the world record but subordinate to the television tower (which does not count as a building under Council on Tall Buildings guidelines).

If the World Financial Center is unveiled as planned in 2001, chances are that it will hold the height record for only a short time before being topped by another structure. Yet chances also are that the newer, taller building will also be in China, which by then will be home to at least half a dozen of the world’s 20 tallest buildings.

An Outmoded Concept

So is the sky the limit?

Not necessarily, says SUNY professor King. He argues that expressing culture and power by height will soon be an outmoded concept.

“No nation can ever ‘win’ by building a tall building, because someone can always go higher,” King says. Better, he says, to create a distinctive building such as the trademark opera house in Sydney, Australia, to manifest a nation’s or city’s or person’s identity--especially if there are economic and environmental arguments against building higher.

“It’s a massive waste of resources,” he says, “and environmentally irresponsible” because of the strain these mini-cities put on infrastructure and services as they create trash, traffic and other problems.

Even Malaysia is casting its sights downward. Its next big project: the world’s longest building. The 10-story, tube-like “Giga-World” will snake for 1.4 miles on stilts over Kuala Lumpur’s Klang River.

The argument that size doesn’t matter may be consolation for North Korea, whose landmark tall building may be distinctive by default. In Pyongyang, the 105-story, pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel casts its shadow over the city like a giant sundial, about three feet higher than the Washington Monument. Construction started in 1982 to commemorate the 70th birthday of the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung.

The Ryugyong was billed as the tallest and grandest hotel in the world. Now the Great Leader is dead, the country is starving, and the elevators don’t work. Visitors are told that the unfinished concrete tower, crumbling and windowless, is still under construction. The long single elevator shaft is slightly out of alignment, engineers say, making the edifice unusable.

It’s a 105-story walk-up.

“Maybe they can use it as a health club,” suggests architect Kenneth Yeang, “or perhaps a giant pigeon coop.”

Tuesday: The decline of the American skyscraper.

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The Ultimate Skyline

How the world’s five tallest skyscrapers would compare if lined up side by side (spires count; antennas don’t):

World Trade Center

New York

110 stories

1,377 feet

****

Empire State Building