Category Archives: Skyscrapers

Triangle tower: building starts on rare Paris skyscraper decried as ‘catastrophe’

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At 180 metres tall, pyramid-shaped glass and steel skyscraper will be city’s third-highest building

Construction of a 42-floor, pyramid-shaped skyscraper began in Paris on Thursday despite local opposition and objections from environmentalists who have called the project “catastrophic”.

The Triangle Tower (Tour Triangle) will, at 180 metres (590ft), become the city’s third-highest building after the Eiffel Tower, completed in 1889, and the Montparnasse Tower, which opened in 1973.

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People flee in panic as 300-metre skyscraper wobbles in China – video

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One of China’s tallest skyscrapers was evacuated on Tuesday after it began to shake, sending panicked shoppers running to safety. The nearly 300-metre (980ft) SEG Plaza in Shenzhen, southern China, inexplicably began to shake at about 1pm, prompting an evacuation of people inside while pedestrians looked on open-mouthed. The building was closed by 2.40pm, according to local media reports

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Panic as 300-metre-high skyscraper wobbles in China

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SEG Plaza in Shenzhen, one of country’s tallest buildings, evacuated after it inexplicably starts shaking

One of China’s tallest skyscrapers was evacuated on Tuesday after it began to shake, sending panicked shoppers scampering to safety.

The near 300 metre (980ft) high SEG Plaza in Shenzhen, southern China, inexplicably began to shake at around 1pm, prompting an evacuation of people inside while pedestrians looked on open-mouthed.

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New York deserves better than Andrew Cuomo’s towering folly Rowan Moore

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The state governor seems determined to give the city’s famous skyline a lumpy revamp

Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York state, is currently resisting calls to resign over allegations of sexual harassment. So what better way to prove that he is definitely not a phallocratic bully than to “ram through”, as one outlet puts it, a super-tall tower called Penn 15, and a vast development around it?

It’s not just that its name reads like the personalised licence plate of an inadequate and not-literate male. It is also that this lumpy object will compete on the New York city skyline with the nearby Empire State Building – Penn 15 would be bulkier than its famous neighbour and almost as tall. It is part of the Penn District, a proposed “campus” that will rip up several city blocks and replace them with what, on the available evidence, looks like further big lumps swathed in bland and generic design.

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Which is the world’s most vertical city?

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You might think of Hong Kong, given its famous skyscraper skyline, but by different measures of verticality other cities come out on top

Looking out from sky100, Hong Kong’s highest observation deck on the 100th floor of the city’s tallest building, the 494-metre-high International Commerce Centre, you get a 360-degree view of one of the world’s most famous skylines – an urban jungle framed by mountains and the gleaming Victoria harbour, with endless clusters of high-rise buildings packed so closely together they resemble a game of Tetris.

It’s little wonder a city of such visible density has more skyscrapers than anywhere else in the world. According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), Hong Kong has 355 buildings over 150m in height.

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‘Like the Eye of Sauron’: western Europe’s tallest building planned for tiny Danish town

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Fast-fashion giant Bestseller set to build skyscraper headquarters in Brande, a 7,000-person rural town

Until a local company announced plans to send a 320-metre skyscraper soaring over the surrounding countryside, most people in Denmark had only the haziest idea where Brande, a town of 7,000 people in rural Jutland, even was.

The Bestseller Tower, designed by star architectural studio Dorte Mandrup, will not only be the tallest building in Denmark, but the tallest in western Europe, besting the Shard in London by a crucial 10.4 metres.

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Super-tall, super-skinny, super-expensive: the ‘pencil towers’ of New York’s super-rich

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An extreme concentration of wealth in a city where even the air is for sale has produced a new breed of needle-like tower. By Oliver Wainwright

It is rare in the history of architecture for a new type of building to emerge. The Romans’ discovery of concrete birthed the great domes and fortifications of its empire. The Victorians’ development of steel led to an era of majestic bridges and vaulted train sheds. The American invention of the elevator created the first skyscrapers in Chicago. Now, we are seeing a new type of structure that perfectly embodies the 21st-century age of technical ingenuity and extreme inequality. A heady confluence of engineering prowess, zoning loopholes and an unparalleled concentration of personal wealth have together spawned a new species of super-tall, super-skinny, super-expensive spire.

Any visitor to New York over the past few years will have witnessed this curious new breed of pencil-thin tower. Poking up above the Manhattan skyline like etiolated beanpoles, they seem to defy the laws of both gravity and commercial sense. They stand like naked elevator shafts awaiting their floors, raw extrusions of capital piled up until it hits the clouds.

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