In London last week, a parabolic “death ray” of sunshine reflected off the city’s newest skyscraper burning cars and singing carpets in adjacent street level shops. It’s a cautionary tale for glass-clad towers in sun-intense Middle East, where robust assessment of a building’s impact on its environment is largely optional. This structure at 20 Fenchurch […]
Construction of the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, also known as the Kingdom Tower, has been plagued by political, economic and labour issues, with the proposed completion date of 2020 deemed unrealistic for many years now.
Rotterdam-based architects MVRDV were smacked with a powerful backlash after unveiling their design for The Cloud, a pair of posh residential skyscrapers located in Seoul, Korea. Hovering about 300 meters above the streetscape, the towers are linked at the 27th floor by a ten-story-high girdle of cubist forms, intended to represent a pixelated “cloud“. The building […]
Brian argues that skyscrapers are not only “un-green,” but they could be a precursor to economic turmoil. The Empire State Building was completed in 1931, the same year E.Y. “Yip” Harburg wrote these lyrics: “Once I built a tower up to the sun, brick and rivet and lime. Once I built a tower, now its […]
After having a hefty meal at the restaurant on the top of the World’s Tallest Building in Dubai… you excuse yourself from the table and head to the W.C…and without even thinking about it, you flush the toilet. Where does the poop go? We wish we could take credit for being the first to ask […]
Climatology models applied to urban planning could yield greener cities. If you have ever walked down the street in a city full of high rises and felt a sudden blast of cold air, or witnessed a swirling mass of dried leaves, chances are you experienced an artificial microclimate created by the surrounding buildings. It turns […]
A year after a municipal planning committee decided to put plans for a row of skyscrapers near Jaffa on hold, the plans are back on track. A new policy document formulated by a Tel Aviv planning committee calls for the construction of a row of very tall buildings in the south of the city, some […]
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Photo by Dan Keinan, Haaretz. A modernist skyscraper was built with no connection to the existing urban context, and plans for a row of similar towers threatened to destroy the character of the historical city center. This so outraged the residents of the area that they managed to bring about a complete ban on skyscraper […]