The explosion in supertall buildings seems to have barely taken a
breather after the global financial crisis. While there were casualties in Dubai, Moscow, and Chicago, others have quickly stepped into the void. What will be the world’s
second-tallest building (640 meters), Digital Media City Landmark Building 디지털 미디어 시티 랜드마크 빌딩, is being built in Seoul with an expected
completion date in 2015. But the Ping’an International Finance Center 平安国际金融中心, under construction in Shenzhen, will almost immediately eclipse it at
660 meters. The following year Seoul will reclaim the number two position with
the Dream Tower 드림 타워 (665 meters).
Meanwhile, proposed buildings in Baku
and Kuwait would both be
taller than even the Burj al Mamlakah. World One Mumbai (442 meters) will be almost 200 meters taller than India’s
current tallest building; the Shard in
London (310 meters) last year became the tallest building in the European
Union; and Moscow’s Mercury City Tower/Меркурий Сити Тауэр (339 meters) will this year become the
tallest completed building in Russia.
As if we needed any more evidence, the meteoric revival of the
skyscraper boom signals that the agents of neoliberalism have changed nothing after
their first brush with death. Skyscrapers are one of the most concrete
expressions of the abstract movements animating a speculative society. They map
the motion of capital spiraling upward into thin air, seemingly unmoored from all
physical constraints. They represent the extreme inequalities of a society
animated by speculation, as the ultra-rich escape from the debased masses
milling about in the sprawl or the slums, into the rarefied
precincts of their towers: the corporate office suites, the requisite luxury
hotels, the extravagant restaurants and bars “in the sky”. The soaring verticality
of the buildings mirrors the assent of the winners in this society over the
losers, or the skyrocketing fortunes of the speculators.
