By Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times
Published: Nov 27, 2007
The construction boom in China has led to all kinds of seemingly apocryphal stories about a shortage of tower cranes and about the prices of steel and concrete going through the roof. The thing is, they turn out not to be apocryphal.
Hong Kong already has nearly 50 per cent more skyscrapers than the city we all still think of as the spiritual home of extruded architecture, New York. Only one of the world’s top 10 tallest buildings is now in the US – Chicago’s Sears Tower.
Asia’s skylines have become the laboratories of architecture. The freedom, speed and volume of development are giving architects the chance to make real and radical innovations.
There has probably never been a time quite like this: horizons are changing by the day, as cities on speed attempt to define themselves through architecture, to create icons of their own skylines.
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