Tallest Under Construction Buildings in the World | Hacker News Reader

Tallest Under Construction Buildings in the World

skyscrapercenter.com

42 pointsigravious51 comments

Here's diagrams of all of the tallest buildings by 2023 (including built ones) visually next to each other sorted by official height thanks to SkyscraperPage: http://skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?searchID=207

The Skyscrapercenter doesn't include the Dubai Creek Tower which is also already under construction.

Is the Dubai Creek Tower freestanding? Or are those lines at the bottom cables for stability?

The architect is Calatrava so those would be structural elements.

Do we know what lead to skyscrapers being built? Intuitively I'd think economic prosperity and density. However, Europe has a pretty good economy, is more densely populated than many other regions, yet hardly any skyscrapers to speak of. Do they maybe get built when you need lots of space in the same location quickly? Like when you have a extreme high growth company. Given most skyscrapers are used by several completely different business, that doesn't fit the bill either.

This is not meant as a criticism of skyscrapers. In have I LOVE skyscrapers, especially ones with nice bars on top. I just want to understand what circumstances lead to them being built.

I think it's a cultural thing. A lot of people in europe think skyscrapers destroy the skylines of cities. They really dislike any changes though. For example, in Stockholm, there was a fire recently in a rather ugly building (where they educate architects!!). Rather than tearing it down and building something better looking than that sh*thole eye sore of a building they are just repairing it.

This is the building I'm talking about: https://www.google.se/maps/@59.3433863,18.0697072,3a,75y,309...

The Azrieli School of Architecture building at Carleton University in Ottawa is a bizarre building that a lot of Architect students have their courses in. The legend on campus is that the building was designed purposely to be filled with architectural flaws so that students would learn from them. I have no idea if it's true, but it certainly would explain a lot.

Perhaps your architect's school has a similar idea in mind. Because seriously, that is a dull looking building.

I can see how it could be good to make future architects suffer bad architecture along their way.

Architecture schools always seem to be ugly for some reason. The one at Berkeley[0] is hideous. Legend has it that it was build to look "inside-out" so the students could have a better understanding of how buildings are built.

[0] https://ced.berkeley.edu/images/made/images/uploads/features...

1. Face/prestige, having a modern skyline conveys internally as externally that china is modern and prosperous.

2. Jobs, these skyscrapers employ lots of people, especially migrant workers, preventing them from becoming idle and dangerous.

3. On paper, land is very expensive in these cities, so making the most of it by building up can make sense.

Demand for A grade office space isn’t that strong, so it can be hard to fill these buildings up without some discounts. Likewise, if you want to stay on the 99th floor at some of the hotels that top these buildings, they are quite affordable. I stayed at the IFC in Guangzhou in 2016, it was around $250/night, and the view was absolutely astounding from such a high floor!

There was a discussion on that in the New Yorker that sadly I failed to save (it was pre-evernote in my life). But as I recall you are essentially correct in your guess. The calculus was the value of leasing all of the space would return $x, the cost of the land was $y and the cost to build was a function of height. You simply solve for the most money returned.

In San Francisco the cost, with the earth quake requirements, seems to go up fairly quickly and it is hard to get anything approved by the city.

Additionally the geography must be able to support sky scrapers. In some places solid stable bedrock is hundreds to thousand+ feet down. This also makes it impractical to build structures beyond a certain height in such areas.

In the US (Chicago), the invention of the elevator led to progressively taller buildings. Today, elevator technology is still one of the limiting factors of how tall you can build.

I live in Wuhan, where the second tallest building Wuhan Greenland Center (636m) is being built. I see it everyday, actually I also find this kind of thing weird, but anyway, it's a good name card for a city, and such construction can give many people jobs, moreover, it may attract more business to the city.

It must be amazing to watch it being built. I would love to live in a part of the world where I could watch this sort of activity, it would be marvellous.

Also notably, 26 out of the top 52 tallest buildings already constructed are also in China.

To be honest, I don’t really understand if there are any practical motivations to race for the tallest building in record.

I suppose it's sort of like the practical motivations of formula 1 racing. The things learned while trying to push the limits to the extreme can lead to practical uses for everyday versions.

For example, if these tall towers figure out a smarter way to move people vertically (non-cabled elevators?), that can be applied to the many 50-story buildings being built for more normal purposes.

Yeah, but if you build, let say, 50 more stories higher each time, while technically challenging for engineers and architects, the new knowledge we gain from each project seems less relevant and useful. I understand that geography, soil and weather system influences each design...

The Burj is the same height AGL as a mountain I used to climb regularly. No matter which way I look at it, I can't shake the perception that the tower is much, much taller than the mountain. I get it that the tower is thin while the mountain is broad, but I still can't perceive them as the same height.

One very tall skyscraper might be a contra-indicator for economic health, like Dubai. All the wealth is concentrated in a few hands. But lots of tall skyscrapers going up everywhere? Lots of people are accumulating lots of wealth. That's some form of progress

Lots of skyscrapers are also contraindicators, unless you think that there are only like 10 thousand people in society.

Tokyo "Sky Mile Tower" is missing on the "proposed" list

Do we have someone here that could explain how this could affect the world if/when an economic crisis hits China? (only talking about the building construction)

Hard to say. There are entire ghost cities in china because people cannot afford to live there. If an economy crisis hits china it’s possible that the entire world is in trouble (though not all countries). These things are hard to predict but china more or less uses local workers and materials. Only companies and people’s investments tied to those companies would in theory be in trouble.

The ghost cities are more like ghost outlying districts of existing cities, and they are often heavily sold as speculation plays, so people own the apartments but few live there (Kangbashi in Ordos is a big example, being built up for 2 million, settling for 100k atm). They simply lack the jobs and facilities to attract people.

Meanwhile, places where people want to live become increasingly congested. However, you’ll find ghost malls even in Beijing and Shanghai (unneeded retail space).

This again. Name even one. Point us to even one "entire" ghost city. Honestly, people will parrot any old thing that sounds dramatic without ever bothering to find out for themselves if it's true.

I doubt Kangbashi is ever going to fill up given how unpopular coal is becoming in china. They might be able to move it to a few hundred K by moving a bunch of government jobs there, but even Donald Trump as president couldn’t get to the few million they built for.

When I first visited Tianjin in 1999, there were a few partially completed tall concrete husk skyscrapers around town. Basically, they were victims of the Asian financial crisis, which, while it didn’t hit China hard, it hit them hard enough. China has been through boom and bust cycles before, it hasn’t been straight growth since the 80s for sure, even if it looks like it has been on paper. But after the crisis, they either refurbish the buildings into third-tier office space, or tear them down and start again.

I don’t think it really affects the rest of world at all. Raw materials will suffer, so the mining sector will take a hit, but that has happened already. A good crisis coupled with some opening up could make China more appealing for international (non-China focused) tech, which is simply difficult ATM with the current property bubble.

Financial crises are unlikely to hit China's economic output while it continues to use counter-cyclical fiscal policy and have access to raw materials.

And 0 in Europe.

As a European. Ouch. It's not like there's no economic activity in Europe so I wonder why that is? We don't like verticality?

Yes. We don't like verticality. That is actually true in much of Europe.

One reason for this comes from geography: Europe is further away from the equator than most other prosperous areas, e.g. US or China. This means that the sun shines diagonally and is particularly low in the winter. And if you build high towers, the neighbours will be deprived of direct sunlight.

Due to daylight norms, high buildings don't actually achieve any higher density.

When you look at Frankfurt they mostly achieve a lot of empty sterile space around them.

Why might that be?

We don't need them

Because we have little growth and very conservative city planning.

Really? This one is 1,082 feet tall. I mean long. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15847093

It would be fascinating to see some sort of multidimensional analysis of the different construction types in order to get a feel for the significance of skyscrapers vs. more distributed structures, etc.

That's the related list of completed tallest building: http://www.skyscrapercenter.com/buildings?list=tallest100-co...

At the moment Shanghai (China) is the cities with most sky scrappers in the world.

@frik – many of your comments (including this one) are dead. Can't tell from your comment history why.

Not related: I don't know why but you are downvoted into oblivion on your recent comments...

>construnction

Usually a good contra-indicator for economic health.

How so? Are there historical examples?

That’s easy: Japan.

The statement was: "Usually a good contra-indicator for economic health". It's a surprising and counter-intuitive claim. Requires more than a single example. It at least requires more examples than you can find to show the opposite of the claim.

Japan is the most apt example. Excess is usually an indicator that a crisis is on its way. The housing bubble pre 2008 in the USA, the roaring 20s before the Great Depression. This isn’t a controversial observation that steep rises are typically followed by even steeper falls, which is why the balloon analogy is so apt. But ATM, china’s situation most resembles Japan.

They're talking about the so-called skyscraper index, "a whimsical concept put forward by Andrew Lawrence," but which posits that a spate of skyscraper building precedes an economic downturn but it is a conjecture that hasn't been verified†.

“A study by Barr, Mizrach and Mundra (2015) […] They find that there is virtually no relationship between the timing of record-breaking buildings and the business cycle. […] In other words, the study finds that extreme height is driven by rapid economic growth, but that height cannot be used as an indicator of recessions.”

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index#Empirical_tes...

I live in Edmonton, Alberta. Our skyline went virtually unchanged for 30 years until about 2013, when a sky scraper building frenzy took off, the culmination of a sustained oil boom. Over 40 towers were planned or under construction in 2014 when the price of oil bottomed out. A bunch of those projects were cancelled or put on hold, but enough of them went up.

So early 2014, if you stood in the right place you could spot 14 construction towers. Being familiar with the theory, I remember looking at all those cranes and thinking 'Oil is going to tank'. It did.

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