China snares Chicago’s skyscraper crown

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Updated: May 4, 2011 4:46AM

In Chicago, visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao is seeing a city famed as the birthplace of the skyscraper. These days, though, China has taken over as the skyscraper’s home.

If the fast-rising nation continues its current rapid pace of urbanization, China could build the equivalent of a new Chicago every year until 2030 — more than 1,500 new buildings that are over 30 stories high — according to a report this month by Jonathan Woetzel, a director at consultants McKinsey & Co in Shanghai.

China is building 44 percent of the 50 skyscrapers to be completed worldwide in the next six years, increasing the number of skyscrapers in Chinese cities by more than 50 percent, said Andrew Lawrence, an Asian property analyst.

Already, China is home to eight of the 15 tallest completed buildings in the world, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, which is based at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

The United States has three.

Dubai’s world-beating Burj Khalifa, at 2,716 feet, should remain top dog for several years, but the Shanghai Tower, at 2,073 feet, and Wuhan’s Greenland Center, at 1,988 feet, will take the world No. 2 and 3 spots in 2014 and 2015.

“The appetite in China for high-rises, in the last five years and the next five, is bigger than ever before in the history of building,” says Silas Chiow, China director for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the U.S. architectural firm, founded in Chicago, responsible for the Burj Khalifa.

His firm is currently engaged in 50 China projects, including the tallest buildings in eight separate cities.

Chinese government officials believe high-rises “show their progress in terms of urbanization and modernism,” as well as spurring wider development and symbolizing “a city’s desire to become modern and international,” says Chiow, a Chinese American based in China for the last 15 years.

While an architect three decades ago might be lucky to design a handful of skyscrapers, today in China, “one architect or firm can do a dozen or more super high-rises,” says Chiow.

Chinese have mixed feelings.

“I feel proud to see these new high buildings, but they’re not much use for ordinary people,” said Fan Quanzhou, 26, who has a newspaper stand opposite the dramatic new headquarters of national broadcaster CCTV and said business is falling as the neighborhood is cleared for Beijing’s tallest building — a 1,640-foot skyscraper in the style of a traditional Chinese wine vessel.

Gannett News Service