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This computer-generated image shows the Shanghai Tower (left) which will stand beside Shanghai World Financial Center (right) and Jin Mao Tower (center) in Lujiazui financial district of Shanghai. |
In 1999, Andrew Lawrence, a research director at Deutsche Bank, created the "skyscraper index" that showed how the world's tallest buildings had risen on the eve of economic downturns. Be it the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur in 1997, the Sears Towers in Chicago in 1974 or the Empire State Building in New York in 1930, all suggested that the construction of ever-taller buildings was a good warning sign of a looming economic slowdown.
Not so, says Gu Jianping, manager of the Shanghai Tower Construction and Development Co. In his view, the Shanghai Tower might be able to escape the "skyscraper curse", with the cost of building materials such as steel and cement falling because of the global economic crisis.
"The timing is great for us," Gu says. "Local companies now have the capability to build such super tall buildings."
The 632-m, 121-story building, which incorporates offices, shops and a hotel, will be Shanghai's crowning landmark in the Lujiazui financial center when it is completed in 2014. Built at a cost of more than 14.8 billion yuan ($2.2 billion), it will tower over the 492-m Shanghai World Financial Center built by Japanese property tycoon Minoru Mori, currently the world's second tallest building with a trapezoid-shaped hole at its top, where a glass-enclosed observation deck offers views from floor 101.
It is not easy for such tall buildings to win the approval of city planners nowadays. Shanghai municipal lawmakers, for example, passed an amended urban planning regulation in 2003 limiting the number of tall buildings in the downtown area.
But the plan for the Lujiazui finance and trade zone in Pudong in 1993 exempted the Shanghai Tower from the regulation on building height. A panel of experts incorporated five design schemes from Britain, France, Italy, Japan and China and put on the drawing board a trio of super-tall buildings as three landmarks for the financial center, says Zhang Shiyu, deputy director of the Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute.
At the construction site of the Shanghai Tower, a score of red piling machines are drilling giant holes for steel casing deep into the ground to fill with concrete. Unlike other construction sites, the walled-off site of almost 400,000 sq m makes very little noise considering the scale of the project.
"We are using this pile-boring technique to lay the foundation because it causes less noise and little vibration, reducing disturbances to neighboring residents and buildings to the minimum," says Gu Jianping of the tower construction company.
About 300 workers are working around the clock to lay the foundation for the tower, which consists of more than 900 piles, 1 m in diameter and up to 86 m deep, with a load capacity of 1,000 tons. It takes 40 to 50 hours to lay one pile and the foundation work is expected to be completed by the end of this year, Gu says.
