North America's share of the 100 tallest buildings in 1990: 80%. In 2012: 18%

[charlie]

BEIJING (AP) — The 121-story Shanghai Tower is more than China's next record-setting building: It's an economic lifeline for the elite club of skyscraper builders.

Financial gloom has derailed plans for new towers in Chicago, Moscow, Dubai and other cities. But in China, work on the 632-meter (2,074-foot) Shanghai Tower, due to be completed in 2014, and dozens of other tall buildings is rushing ahead, powered by a buoyant economy and providing a steady stream of work to architects and engineers.

The U.S. high-rise market is "pretty much dead," said Dan Winey, a managing director for Gensler, the Shanghai Tower's San Francisco-based architects. "For us, China in the next 10 to 15 years is going to be a huge market"...

"So 34 percent of the 100 tallest buildings will be in a single country. That has only happened once before, and that was with the USA," he said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-05/china-s-skyscraper-boom-buoys-global-industry.html

[Dr Morbius]

1. Another indicator of the direction of the global economy.

Alas.

[KharmaTrain]

2. The Phallic Symbols Of Power...

This shows where the balance of money power has gone. Also seen as a sign of power and prestige by governments that are the ones doing most of the building. The one thing this article doesn't mention is that its American construction firms like OSM that have built most of these new giants.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

3. To be fair, a many U.S. cities have bans on high rises.

Like Washington DC, which absolutely needs to have them but doesn't because they fear losing the non-existent skyline that they currently have. Meanwhile, said bans put a huge strain on affordable housing because high rises increase commercial property density leaving more land for apartments.

[Javaman]

4. Quick! Some architectural viagra, STAT! nt

[Igel]

5. US highrises had two purposes.

First, to use expensive downtown real estate at a time when a company's employees needed to be concentrated for reasons of efficiency or control; second, to show how big and important a company was.

China's and Dubai's high rises have a different set of purposes: Employ people and show how big and important a country is.

Country vs. company? A country, esp. one with an on-going nationalism project, is going to trump a company's resources, esp. since the company will be looking at whether or not prestige translates into something that the company wants--market share, profits, growth, continued existence. Companies don't need to be concentrated in one place. Meanwhile, a country will look at whether the prestige translates into something the country's government wants--and with increased nationalism and chauvinism, that isn't hard. In other words, the ROI is calculated differently.

It's always humorous, though, that often the person who decries chauvinism puts the most stock in such silly nationalist symbols as a gauge of something really important.