Jonathan Morrison
Why we will never stop reaching for the sky
The Tulip will be a striking addition to the London skyline but is left way behind by the world’s first kilometre-high building, says Jonathan Morrison
We’ve had the Gherkin, the Shard, the Scalpel, the Cheesegrater, the Walkie-Talkie, the Can of Ham and the Chicken Drumstick — and I only made up the last of those. Now we’re about to get the Tulip, a 305m observation tower that, barring the Shard, will be the tallest structure in London, and which was granted planning permission just last week.
Less than 20 years ago, skyscrapers were the exception rather than the rule in the capital, with only one over 150m in the City (the NatWest Tower) and one in Canary Wharf (1 Canada Square), although the BT Tower, which opened in 1965, had long dominated views from the west. But from late Victorian times to 1956, no occupied building was permitted to be taller than a fireman’s ladder — roughly ten storeys — which also meant no building was taller than St Paul’s. And the developers took until the mid-1960s to catch up.
Now there are 20 structures over 150m, with a further 13 under construction, including the 278m-tall 22 Bishopsgate in the City, with its facial recognition security and the world’s highest climbing wall, which will be completed in weeks, and 25 more going through planning. There are clusters in the main financial districts, but also in Battersea, Greenwich and Paddington, and a mushrooming of apartment blocks in the east.
While the skyline of the capital may be changing dramatically, it is if anything an understated evolution compared with cities in China, where “supertalls” of 300m or more are being thrown up at an incredible pace: there were 11 in China in 2018, including the 528m Citic Tower, in Beijing, and the China Resources Headquarters in Shenzen, which reaches almost 400m; there will be another 30 this year. By comparison, the US built three supertalls in total in 2018, including the elegant Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, but is expected to finish five in New York alone in 2019. Three of these will be at the $25 billion Hudson Yards development, built on a 35,000-ton concrete and steel platform above an operational rail yard on the west side of Manhattan.
Meanwhile, Europe will finish off one supertall, the 462m Lakhta Centre in St Petersburg, which is already the continent’s tallest structure and which was largely designed by Tony Kettle, a Scot. London’s Shard, at 310m, is still the only supertall in the country, and will stay that way until Foster and Partners’ Tulip, with its multideck glass viewing platform and rotating pods on the exterior, is finished in 2025.
There are now 3,251 skyscrapers over 150m in 258 cities around the world, but there could be 41,000 by 2050, according to research by two statisticians, Jonathan Auerbach at Columbia University in New York, and Phyllis Wan, of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. That works out at 6,800 skyscrapers per billion people, and they might be needed: they also predict that 6 billion people will live in cities worldwide by 2050, up from four billion today, assuming war and pestilence do not prevail.
Much of this incredible boom in skyscraper construction has been made possible by advances in civil engineering. The materials needed to build ever upwards are of relatively recent invention: wrought iron was used for the Eiffel Tower, finished in 1889, but generally gave way to steel after 1855, when the Bessemer process made it cheap as well as reliable; Portland cement emerged in the mid-1800s, and the first skyscrapers followed within a decade or so: Chicago’s 42m Home Insurance Building opened in 1885. The work of Britain’s Alastair Pilkington in the 1950s then enabled them to be wrapped in sheets of glass.
Fast forward, and the first kilometre-tall building — the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia — is due to be completed next year and may soon be exceeded. Yet reaching a kilometre isn’t the same as taking a 500m building and doubling it. For every new floor you add, the pressure on those below intensifies exponentially.
For the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, still the world’s tallest at 828m, engineers developed a Y-shaped structure called the “buttressed core”, which derives its inspiration from the cathedrals of old, and future towers may be left open at the base, coming to resemble giant rockets, as building straight up would require so much concrete at the bottom that there would be no usable space. So material science is now critical, and the development of new materials, including concrete containing limestone bacteria that can heal cracks, or carbon nano-tubes for additional strength, promises much.
There are a number of factors that limit height, however. Wind is one of them, and the architects of the Burj — Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, a Chicago-based firm — designed it to get narrower towards the top in a series of 26 “setbacks” to stop vortices forming behind it that might pull it over. Most skyscrapers taper a bit for that reason. But the Burj is in a different league, being much bigger. Of course, any tall building acts a bit like a sail and nowadays they often boast “tuned mass dampers”, which act like giant pendulums or sliding weights and counteract movement by leaning or moving the other way. In Taipei 101, in Taiwan, a 730-tonne damper near the top has helped it withstand 134mph winds as well as a 6.8 magnitude earthquake.
The lifts are also important: generally speaking they can only travel 500m due to the weight of the cable, as at the Burj, meaning occupants have to change shafts to move farther up. But since 1857, and the first (safe) elevator in New York, engineers have been working on improvements: there are now carbonfibre cables developed by the Finnish firm Kone with enhanced strength, while ThyssenKrupp, of Germany, is busy testing a “Willy Wonka” lift that can move in any direction along mag-lev rails and resembles the floating elevator from the 1971 film. Fewer and smaller shafts mean more vital floorspace and less heavy machinery.
So why put all this effort into building up? From the pyramids to medieval cathedrals, there has always been an element of awe through altitude. Where we used to honour gods, we now honour corporations, and skyscrapers usually say something positive about their creators: that they are innovative and forward-thinking, that they stand at the centre of events and business. That they are powerful, above all.
For many years skyscrapers were a sign of American economic dominance, and since the early versions were almost all in Chicago and Manhattan, they formed a distinct vernacular of their own, a hymn to American wealth and ingenuity. It was perhaps inevitable that their symbolism would be co-opted by the Chinese and places such as Doha and Dubai, which use their futuristic skylines as a marketing tool. But if skyscrapers are as much economic indicators as the lines on a bar chart, they are also synonymous with vanity and ego: last week, too, the Danish fashion conglomerate Bestseller was granted permission to build western Europe’s tallest tower in Brande, a town of 7,000 people. There is no reason to build a 317m edifice in the middle of the countryside other than to make a statement. It’s not about Brande but branding.
Yet we’re also simply hardwired to like tall buildings, according to Adam Kampff, a neuroscientist working at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre in Fitzrovia, central London. He believes the human drive to “be up high” originated in our primate ancestors, who found safety and resources in the tree canopy.
“The complexities of living high above the ground presented new challenges for the brain, which only primates’ improved vision and dexterity could solve,” he says. “It was these same advances that would ultimately allow hominids to leave the trees and use their increased brain power for communicating with one another and composing tools that extended their physical abilities.
“With their new visual ability to both understand the environment and predict what was coming next, seeing farther also allowed early humans to see ‘into the future’, and anticipate the paths of prey or manoeuvrings of enemies. But the brain has not changed much since humans descended from the trees, and thus our drive to ‘be up high’ remains.”
In architecture, new technology has allowed us to “super-satisfy” our ancient drive to be up high, regardless of its original purpose and despite the consequences, Kampff says. “As our society finally begins to consider the impact of blindly appeasing our old brain with new technology, it is important to also consider what this implies for the future of architecture.”
One symptom of “super-satisfying” our desire for height is the new crop of “super-skinnies” in New York. These pencil-thin towers are already starting to dominate the skyline of Manhattan, and contain apartments priced at around $30 million with a 360-degree view to die for. Another is the super-abundance of viewing platforms and sky-gardens in places like London: of the 12 new skyscrapers proposed for the City by 2026, nine will feature an observation deck of some sort.
Do we really need them all? There will be glass slides and moving pods in the Tulip, a glass-bottomed viewing platform at Hudson Yards in Manhattan, and from Auckland to Las Vegas there are skywalks and bungee-jumping opportunities aplenty. And everything will be covered in LEDs and lit like a Blade Runner billboard at night.
What we’re witnessing is in fact a new frivolity in architecture, which is increasingly able to indulge the wildest ideas of clients who want the latest, the newest and, of course, the highest. We live in an Instagram and Facebook age in which novelty has become the most precious commodity of all. The sardonic nicknames given to London’s towers proclaim, though, that we remain ambivalent about this: about the childlike, building-block shapes, about the power of financial interests and rich developers, and about placing transient fun over enduring beauty or even spirituality.
While brash towers may help put places such as Doha on the map, many feel that they do little for the citizenry of historic places like London, which already has plenty to entertain and attract. So it’s time to decide what we want our towers to be: do we want edifices that edify, or that comprise some sort of urban funfair? Do we want the money earmarked for a public benefit (as required under section 106 of the 1990 Town and Country Planning Act) to go on yet another rooftop bar, or would we rather developers’ cash went to social housing projects or libraries? How important is the skyline to us? Who owns it?
It’s not just a London problem. Manchester has been wrestling with the threat posed to its historic buildings in the city centre by a new tower, designed for the footballers turned developers Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs by Hodder+Partners, while Liverpool’s Unesco World Heritage Site status has come under threat from the “Liverpool Waters” development of tall apartment blocks. And of course, many historic neighbourhoods in Chinese cities have been bulldozed to make way for shiny new complexes. In New York, the Hudson Yards development has been decried as “a rich man’s playground” that excludes locals and where a haircut costs £600.
At the same time that we’re building skyline attractions we’re destroying perfectly good buildings such as Broadgate in the City that are barely 40 years old, or Richmond House in Whitehall. Given that cement production accounts for 8 per cent of all CO2 emissions worldwide, and construction in London for 33 per cent of pollution, some would see this as being close to immoral. We need to start using the buildings we have got properly and good architecture should be endlessly reuseable.
It would be sensible if the planning system could consider how flexible a proposed structure is and whether it can be repurposed when necessary. One example is the architect Sir Nicholas Grimshaw’s transformation of one of his earliest works, the Herman Miller Factory, built beside the Avon in 1976, into an art and design faculty for Bath Spa University. Even back then the original building was designed to be adaptable, with a “completely demountable cladding system of fibreglass, louvres and glazing”. And we’ve also just seen the first large building with a moveable shell: The Shed, an arts venue in New York, which can be shrunk or extended as required. In the future we may even see stadia that can be folded away after use, as proposed by Populous, the designers of the new White Hart Lane. So the possibilities are almost endless.
While we aim for the sky we need to remember the need for innovative thinking as well as unusual shapes.
Top ten tallest in the world
1 Burj Khalifa, Dubai (UAE), 828m (2,717ft), 163 floors, built 2010
2 Shanghai Tower, Shanghai (China) 632m (2,073ft), 128 floors, 2015
3 Makkah Royal Clock Tower, Mecca (Saudi Arabia), 601m (1,972ft), 120 floors, 2012
4 Ping An Finance Center, Shenzhen (China), 599m (1,965ft), 115 floors, 2017
5 Lotte World Tower, Seoul (South Korea), 555m (1,819ft), 123 floors, 2017
6 One World Trade Center, New York City (US), 541m (1,776ft), 104 floors, 2014
7 Guangzhou CTF Finance Center, Guangzhou (China), 530m, 1,739ft, 111 floors, 2016
8 Citic Tower, Beijing (China), 528m (1,731ft), 109 floors, 2018
9 Taipei 101, Taipei (Taiwan), 508m (1,667ft), 101 floors, 2004
10 Shanghai World Financial Center, Shanghai (China), 494m (1,622ft), 101 floors, 2008
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