November 30, 2007 | Broadcast News

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.

Read more on the Financial Times Online

Related posts:

1. Asian projects are proving to be “a financial lifeline to U.S. architectural firms” Even as many building sites have been idled world-wide in...
2. Behind Beijing’s icons…and how what we see on TV will be different than what Chicago wants to build for the 2016 Olympics The Skyline | Chicago Tribune | Blog - The Olympics...
3. New supertall commissions announced by Smith and Gill for Dubai, including mega-towers, worth $15 billion Against a backdrop of nose-diving world markets, it sounds like...
4. Bombay’s slum makeover It may just be the world’s most extreme property...
5. Shanghai presents the world’s tallest building World Architecture News.com - Standing at 494m tall from sidewalk...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JJ is the co-founder of 5ft Creatives and is presently enrolled as a graduate student at the Yale School of Architecture.