New Geography

Tag: Asia

  • 125 Years of Skyscrapers

    Skyscrapers have always intrigued me. Perhaps it began with selling almanacs to subscribers on my Oregon Journalpaper route in Corvallis. I have continued to purchase almanacs each year and until recently, the first thing I would do is look in the index for "Buildings, tall” in the old Pulitzer The World Almanac, the best source until the Internet.

    My 1940 edition is the first in which “Buildings, tall” appears. The world of skyscrapers has changed radically through the years. This article provides a historical perspective on the world’s tallest buildings, using information from almanacs and the Internet (See Table Below). Extensive hyperlinking is also used, principally to articles on particular buildings.

    The Rise of Commercial and Residential Buildings

    Throughout most of history, the tallest habitable buildings have been religious edifices, or mausoleums, such as the great pyramids of Egypt. But in the middle to late 19th century, taller commercial and residential buildings were erected in the United States. For four years, from 1890 to 1894, the New York World Building, itself was the tallest in the world, at 309 feet (95 meters) and 20 floors. But it was not until the turn of the 20th century that a commercial or residential building exceeded the tallest religious building, Ulm Cathedral in Germany. This was Philadelphia’s City Hall. In its wisdom, however, Philadelphia outlawed any building higher than William Penn’s head at the top of City Hall. It was not until the late 1980s that a taller building appeared in Philadelphia (One Liberty Place).

    Tallest Buildings in 1940

    Despite Chicago’s claim as birthplace of the skyscraper, by 1940, nine of the 10 tallest buildings in the world were in New York. Manhattan was so dominant that the World Almanac listed the city at the top of the list, out of alphabetical order. The five tallest buildings, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, 60 Wall Tower (now 70 Pine), 40 Wall Tower (now the Trump Building) and the RCA Building (now the GE Building) all  opened in the 1930s and represent Art Deco at its zenith. The sixth tallest, the Woolworth Building, had been the world’s tallest from 1913 to 1930 and is neo-Gothic.

    Cleveland’s Terminal Tower was 7th tallest, and the tallest building in the world outside New York. Cleveland’s Union Terminal was in the building and served the legendary New York Central Railroad’spremier New York to Chicago 20th Century Limited.

    Tallest Buildings in 1962

    Things changed little by 1962. The five Art Deco skyscrapers that where the tallest in 1940 remained so in 1962. There were two newcomers to the top 10 list, both modernist monoliths, the Chase Manhattan Bank Building in lower Manhattan and the Pan Am Building (later the Met-Life Building). The Pan Am Building is despised by many New Yorkers as Parisians despise the Tour Montparnasse. This led to banning similar behemoths in the ville de Paris (most of the skyscrapers in the Paris urban area are in La Defense, a nearby suburban “edge city”). But all of the 10 tallest buildings in the world were in the United States.

    Tallest Buildings in 1981

    Just two decades later, New York’s dominance eroded. By now, The World Almanac listed New York in alphabetical order, between New Orleans and Oakland. For the first time since before 1908 when the Singer Building opened, New York was not the home of the world’s tallest building. That title had gone to Chicago’s, Sears Tower (later Willis Tower), which opened in 1974. Chicago gained even more respect with two other buildings appearing in the top 10, the Standard Oil Building (nowAon Center) and the John Hancock Center, which was the tallest mixed use (residential and commercial) building in the world. The twin towers of the former New York World Trade Center were tied for second tallest in the world.

    For the first time, a non-American skyscraper was in the top 10. Toronto’s First Canadian Place was the eighth tallest in the world. Only three of the former five New York Art Deco buildings remained in the top 10, with 40 Wall Tower and the RCA Building no longer on the list.

    Tallest Building in 2000

    By 2000,   Kuala Lumpur, which is not among the largest cities in the world, emerged with both of the tallest buildings, in the Petronas Towers. The Petronas Towers ended America’s long history of having the tallest building. These distinctive postmodern towers were just two of six Asian entries in the top 10, including another postmodern structure, the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai’s Pudong, which is probably the world’s largest edge city.

    I recall my surprise at exiting the Guangzhou East Railway station in 1999 to see the CITIC Tower, the 7th tallest building in the world. There could have been no better indication of that nation’s modernization. The Pearl River Delta had two other of the tallest buildings, one in Shenzhen (Shun Hing Square), the special economic zone that became the economic model for the rest of China, and the second in Hong Kong (Central Plaza).

    Tallest Building in 2013

    By 2013, the world of skyscrapers had nearly completely overturned. Dubai, with a population little more than Minneapolis-St. Paul, is now home to the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. The Burj Khalifa is not just another building. Never in history has a new tallest building exceeded the height of the previous tallest building by so much. Even the long dominant Empire State Building had exceeded the Chrysler building by only 200 feet (64 meters). The Burj Khalifa was nearly 1050 feet higher (320 meters) than the then tallest building, Taipei 101, and reaches to more than 1/2 mile (0.8 kilometers) into the sky. The world’s second tallest building (the Mecca Royal Hotel Clock Tower) is also on the Arabian Peninsula.

    The Shanghai World Financial Center is now the fourth tallest in the world, and when it opened had the highest habitable floor and the highest observation deck in the world. Its unusual design has earned it the nickname "bottle opener" among residents (Photo 1). Hong Kong has a new entry in the list, the International Commerce Center, across the harbor in Kowloon. Nanjing’s Greenland Financial Complex (Photo 2) ranks 8th, and Shenzhen’s Kinkey 100 ranks 10th.


    Nine of the 10 tallest buildings in the world are now in Asia. The last American entry is the Sears Tower (Willis Tower), in Chicago, which ranks 9th. Skyscraperpage.com maintains a graphic of the world’s tallest buildings (Note 1).

    Under Construction: A number of super-tall buildings (Note 2) will soon open. Earlier this month, the Shanghai Tower was “topped out.” This structure is across the street from the Jin Mao Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Center, forming by far the greatest concentration of super-tall skyscrapers in the world (Photo 1). The Ping An Finance Center in Shenzhen and the Wuhan Greenland Center in Wuhan are also under construction, and will rank, at least temporarily, second and third tallest in the world when completed. The Goldin Finance Building in Tianjin and the Lotte World Tower in Seoul will be somewhat shorter. One World Trade Center in New York will be completed before most of these, which will allow it brief entry into the top ten.

    Another entry, Sky City in Changsha (Hunan) could be on the list, slightly taller than the Burj Khalifa. This building is to be constructed in 210 days, following site preparation and work began last month. It was, however, halted by municipal officials and there are conflicting reports as to the building’s status.

    Skyscraperpage.com also maintains a graphic of the world’s tallest under-construction buildings.

    Tallest Buildings in 2020?

    None of the tallest buildings in the world are predicted to be in the United States by 2020, according to a graphic of current plans posted on the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat website. The Burj Khalifa is expected to be replaced as tallest by another Arabian Peninsula entry, the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, which will be 0.6 miles high (3.3 kilometers). The torch has been passed to Asia.

    WORLD’S TALLEST COMPLETED BUILDINGS: 1940-2013
    1940 Building City Feet Meters Stories
    1 Empire State New York 1,250 381 102
    2 Chrysler New York 1,046 319 77
    3 60 Wall Tower (70 Pine Street) New York 950 290 66
    4 40 Wall Tower (Trump) New York 927 283 90
    5 RCA New York 850 259 70
    6 Woolworth New York 792 241 60
    7 Terminal Tower Cleveland 708 216 52
    8 Metropolitan Life New York 700 213 50
    9 500 5th Avenue New York 697 212 60
    10 20 Exchange Place New York 685 209 54
    1962 Building City Feet Meters Stories
    1 Empire State New York 1,250 381 102
    2 Chrysler New York 1,046 319 77
    3 60 Wall Tower (70 Pine Street) New York 950 290 66
    4 40 Wall Tower (Trump) New York 927 283 71
    5 RCA New York 850 259 70
    6 Pan Am (Met-Life) New York 830 253 59
    7 Chase Manhattan New York 813 248 60
    8 Woolworth New York 792 241 60
    9 20 Exchange Place New York 741 226 57
    10 Terminal Tower Cleveland 708 216 52
    1981 Building City Feet Meters Stories
    1 Sears Tower (Willis Tower) Chicago 1,454 443 110
    2 World Trade Center-North Tower New York 1,350 411 110
    2 World Trade Center-South Tower New York 1,350 411 110
    4 Empire State New York 1,250 381 102
    5 Standard Oil (Amoco) Chicago 1,136 346 80
    6 John Hancock Center Chicago 1,127 344 100
    7 Chrysler New York 1,046 319 77
    8 Texas Commerce Tower Houston 1,002 305 75
    9 First Canadian Place Toronto 952 290 72
    10 60 Wall Tower (70 Pine Street) New York 950 290 66
    2000 Building City Feet Meters Stories
    1 Petronas Tower 1 Kuala Lumpur 1,483 452 88
    1 Petronas Tower 2 Kuala Lumpur 1,483 452 88
    3 Sears Tower (Willis Tower) Chicago 1,454 443 110
    4 Jin Mao Tower Shanghai 1,381 421 88
    5 World Trade Center-North Tower New York 1,350 411 110
    5 World Trade Center-South Tower New York 1,350 411 110
    7 Citic Plaza Guangzhou 1,283 391 80
    8 Shun Hing Center Shenzhen 1,260 384 69
    9 Empire State New York 1,250 381 102
    10 Central Plaza Hong Kong 1,227 374 78
    2013 Building City Feet Meters Stories
    1 Burj Khalifa Dubai 2,717 828 163
    1 Mecca Royal Hotel Clock Tower Mecca 1,971 601 120
    3 Taipei Taipei 101 1,670 508 101
    4 Shanghai World Financial Center Shanghai 1,614 592 101
    5 International Commerce Center Hong Kong 1,588 484 118
    6 Petronas Tower 1 Kuala Lumpur 1,483 452 88
    6 Petronas Tower 2 Kuala Lumpur 1,483 452 88
    8 Greenland Financial Complex Nanjing 1,476 450 89
    9 Sears Tower (Willis Tower) Chicago 1,454 443 110
    10 Kinkey 100 Shenzhen 1,450 442 100
      Outside United States
      United States, Outside New York
      New York

     

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

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    Note 1: There are a number of sources for information on tall buildings, such as the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, Skyscraperpage.com, Emporis.comand Wikipedia.com. Of course, my favorite will always be The World Almanac, even if the Internet provides faster access. Wikipedia also has fascinating articles on individual buildings (Wikipedia’sutility is limited to recreational research for identifying original sources, and should never be used in serious research, or God forbid, used in a footnote).

    Note 2: The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats defines a super-tall building as being over 980 feet (300 meters) high.

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    Photo 1: Jin Mao Tower (left) and Shanghai World Financial Center (right), Shanghai. Construction began later on the recently topped out Shanghai Tower to the right of the Shanghai World Financial Center.

    Photo 2: Greenland Financial Center, Nanjing

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    Photograph: The New York World Building (1890-1955).

  • Can Kamaishi, Japan Recover From the Tsunami?

    KAMAISHI, Japan – Two years after the disastrous 2011 earthquake and tsunami, most of the debris from the deluge has been cleared away in this small city on the northern edge of Japan’s tsunami coast. The cars and vans once piled on top of each other like some kind of apocalyptic traffic jam have been sorted out or sold for scrap. My guide, a local teacher who lost three of her aunts in the deluge, drives us up to a lookout. Spread out below us is the coastal village of Unosumai, or, more accurately, what once was the village of Unosumai. The view reminds me of pictures taken of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb had flattened almost everything. The only exception there was one surviving building, the former Industrial Promotion Hall in Hiroshima’s Peace Garden.

    In Unosumai, the village hall is still standing, broken windows and all, with the huge clock over the main entrance still fixed forever on 3:25 p.m., the time on March 11 of 2011 when an enormous wall of water washed into the building, drowning many of the village workers. A small shrine with flowers is set in front. While we stopped there, several people arrive to pray and give obeisance.

    Kamaishi is a hilly city with little flat land. Rising directly behind the central business district are three steep hills, covered with a network of wooden ladders, stairways and pathways that have long provided a natural shelter against tsunami, a kind of local version of the storm shelters in Oklahoma. Tsunami is an historic threat here in the same way that deadly tornadoes are there.

    These routes upward were critical in saving many lives. The town is extremely proud that not one of the approximately 3,000 elementary through high school children was killed in the surge, even though their schools, located along the shore, were inundated. It is often called the “Kamaishi Miracle.” By all accounts, the teachers and students performed admirably in the thirty minutes or so between the earthquake and the tsunami. Teachers had the presence of mind to tell their charges to literally ‘take to the hills’. Don’t wait. Older students carried the younger elementary school children on their backs as they climbed to safety.

    Kamaishi was famous for its network of seawalls, built at considerable expense before the tsunami. The seawalls utterly failed to hold back the surging tide. Plans to rebuild or strengthen them, using money from the national reconstruction fund, have become a source of controversy. Why spend so much money on a system that demonstrably failed its ultimate test?

    Some argue that the sea walls gave the residents a false sense of security. “I do believe that, unconsciously, the breakwater’s presence did give people a false sense of security,” says Mayor Takenori Noda. Loud speakers all over the city had warned people to flee, with enough time to get to higher ground. Most of the town is within about two hundred yards of the nearest evacuation stairway.

    Today, there isn’t much evidence of new construction going on. The national government has appropriated billions of yen to facilitate rebuilding in the tsunami-devastated zone, but not much is being spent in this town. When the slate is wiped totally clean, it is not surprising that it takes time to decide what to write as a replacement.

    Kamaishi and other Japanese towns along the northeastern tsunami coast need something more basic than millions of yen in reconstruction aid sunk into greater seawalls, namely, a rationale for their existence. For more than a hundred years, the city’s reason for being was grounded on its famous Steel Works.

    The location of Japan’s first steel mill blast furnace, Kamaishi started to rise even before the Meiji Restoration began Japan’s transformation into a modern, industrial society. Built in 1857, the furnace was initially established to provide the steel needed for modern artillery to defend the country.

    The city’s heyday was probably in the 1950 and 1960s, when some 12,000 people were employed by the mill, and the town had a population or more than 90,000. Nippon Steel closed the works in 1988, putting thousands out of work. The town’s population has steadily declined, and is now around 40,000.

    Kamaishi Steel Works never found a niche to justify itself, unlike Japan Steel Works a little further north on the island of Hokkaido. It, too, supplied the steel needed to build the large guns for the Imperial Japanese Navy, but it then evolved into a lucrative niche business to forge reactor pressure vessels for nuclear power plants, which it developed into virtually a global monopoly.

    Kamaishi struggled to find a substitute for defense production. It recruited various metal-working enterprises. Some stayed, but others left because the location was too far from regular supply networks. The small harbor was thought to have container-ship potential, but it never developed into the kind of terminal that some of the city fathers had envisioned. The day I visited it was quiet and empty of ships.

    In 2010, Foreign Policy Magazine used Kamaishi as an exemplar of what it thought ailed Japan’s economy, especially the propensity to spend billions of yen on unneeded and ultimately useless public works projects, including Kamaishi’s famous city breakwater.

    Has Kamaishi’s story changed since then? One element of the town’s new reconstruction plan involves a request for funds to build a rugby stadium. With the once formidable Kamaishi Nippon Steel Rugby team long gone, one has to wonder who would play there.

    Todd Crowell is a Tokyo-based journalist.

    Flickr photo by Master Sgt. Jeremy Lock, 1st Combat Camera Squadron 1. Posted by DVIDSHUB: “Petzel, a search and rescue dog with the Fairfax County, Va., Task Force 1 Urban Search and Rescue team waits for his master before heading out to search structures and debris on March 17, 2011, in Unosumai, Japan. A 9.0 earthquake hit Japan on March 11 that caused a tsunami that destroyed anything in its path.” Related Photos: dvidshub.net/r/sojri7.

  • The Collapse of Racial Politics in Southeast Asia

    The recent general election in Malaysia left behind a bitter legacy of political divisions, threats of lawsuits, growing demonstrations, and arrests under the Sedition Act. In a larger sense, however, it was another sign that the race-based political order in Malaysia, and to a certain extent in neighboring Singapore, is breaking down.

    Ever since Malaysia won independence in 1957 it has been governed by a coalition – the National Front or Barisan Nasional (BN) – made up of as many as a dozen parties, representing the ethnic and racial makeup of this multicultural country.

    The quintessential representative of the old order was Mahathir Mohamad, who served 22 years (1981 to 2003) as prime minister. He spoke in Tokyo shortly after the May 5th general election and defended the coalition system as a means of apportioning the power and wealth of the country among its diverse groups.

    After each general election the Barisan distributed cabinet posts to the leaders of the various partners, assuring that some posts went to ethnic Chinese, to ethnic Indians, and to representatives of aboriginal and indigenous peoples in the states of Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo.

    Mostly, these were second and third-tier portfolios. The plum jobs, such as defense, foreign affairs, finance, and of course the prime minister’s post itself went to the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) that represented, in this racial scheme, the Malays, who make up about 60 percent of the population.

    This year, for the first time, no ethnic Chinese will be serving in the cabinet. Chinese voters deserted the main Chinese coalition parties in droves to vote for an opposition coalition under the leadership of Anwar Ibrahim, leaving hardly anyone available to take up the jobs. Prime Minister Najib Razak called it a “Chinese tsunami”.

    Increasingly, the BN is dependent on East Malaysian parties to maintain a majority. The 47 seats that the Barisan won in Sabah and Sarawak saved Najib’s bacon last month. Without them, he might have fallen short of the majority needed to form a government under Malaysia’s Westminster style of government.

    But it is an unstable base, as it depends on continued malapportionment. For example, the capital, Kuala Lumpur, with a population of 7 million has 11 seats, while Sabah, with 3.5 million people sends 25 members to parliament. That kind of imbalance cannot persist in a democratic country, especially as more young people drawn to the under-represented areas see themselves left out.

    In his recent talk, Mahathir lamented that Malaysia is still a divided country, without seeming to acknowledge that the system of race-based politics might itself have contributed to the divisions. The Chinese, who make up a quarter of the population, refuse to assimilate, unlike ethnic Chinese in Indonesia or Thailand, he said.

    He might have noted that for years, the Suharto regime in Indonesia suppressed outward manifestations of ethnicity, to the point of banning celebrations of Chinese New year, Chinese language schools even the use of the Chinese script. These restrictions were lifted only with the end of the New Order regime in 1998.

    In neighboring Singapore, the old order, built around a monopoly of power for the governing Peoples’ Action Party, is slowly crumbling, too. In the 2011 general election the PAP garnered about 60 percent of the vote, better perhaps than the Barisan’s 47 percent this year, but still the lowest percentage since independence.

    For the first time, the opposition captured a Group Representative Constituency, a unique Singaporean form of electoral machinery whereby five candidates run as a slate. The system was ostensibly designed to ensure racial balance, since at least one member had to come from a Malay, Indian or other minority community.

    That is the rationale, anyway. Many believe it was meant to disable the opposition by making it harder to recruit enough candidates and pay the costs of running, while at the same time providing electoral refuge for weaker PAP candidates who might lose in face-to-face encounters.

    Overnight, the opposition tripled its numbers in parliament. Capturing the Aljuniad GRC was like climbing Mount Everest. It will be easier next time. The opposition in Singapore, such as it was, once was made up of gadflies and loners. But a new breed of highly educated Singaporeans is aspiring to lead, exemplified by the new opposition MP Chen Shaw Mao, a former Rhodes Scholar.

    Malaysia’s prime minister returns to office considerably weakened. His coalition performed even worse than it did in 2008 under his predecessor, Abdullah Badawi, who resigned, taking the blame for the poor showing. Najib faces threat of coalition defections and the possibility, though remote, that some of his members may be disqualified through successful challenges based on voter fraud.

    He is fighting back, in part by wielding the Sedition Act against demonstrators, and by packing the cabinet with Malay nationalists. Najib has to stand for re-election as leader of UMNO at a party conference later this month, where he may be challenged by his deputy, Muhyidden Yassin.

    Mahathir predicted that, in the end, the party and the coalition will come around to supporting Najib because “there is no alternative.” That maybe more true today than it will be tomorrow.

    Todd Crowell is a Tokyo-based journalist. He has covered Malaysian politics for Asiaweek magazine.

    Flickr photo by Hitoribocchi; Pakatan Rakyat Rally, general elections, Malaysia, May, 2013.

  • Asian Pollution Hitting West Coast

    Looks like there is a cost to all those cheap industrial goods made in China after all. This article from McClatchy discusses the problem of pollution from Asia hitting the West Coast:

    “By some estimates more than 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia — ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone — reach the U.S. annually.”

    That’s a hard number to visualize. It does, however, bring home the global problem of pollution.