MVRDV   Albania   On its main facades, the tower is characterized by cantilevered offices and apartments. Each one of them represents a town or city of Albania, so the visual play they generate with the terraces, seen from afar, configures an abstract map of the count

CEBRA architecture   Albania   The impressive mountains that surround the capital of Albania inspire the design of this mixed-use skyscraper set to be the country’s tallest, and houses apartments, shops, boutique hotel, business area, offices, and parking as well as restaurants an

Valerio Olgiati   Albania   The Rruga Adem Jashari mixed-use development presents three russet-hued towers and a white stepped pyramid. Located on a strategic site in the Albanian capital, on the boundary between the urban fabric and an adjacent park, the pigmented concrete co

FRPO Selgascano   Albania   Located near the Montenegro border, Shkodra is one of Albania’s oldest cities. An important cultural and economic hub, it was the capital until 1920, when the seat of government moved to Tirana. Along with a natural landscape it has a rich cultural h

Herzog & de Meuron   Switzerland   The collaboration between the pharmaceutical company F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG and Herzog & de Meuron began in the 1990s. In the three decades since then, a series of buildings has been realized. A development plan devised in 2014 provides the urban gu

OODA architecture   Albania   This mixed-use 50-floor tower in the western part of the the capital of Albania is designed to offer 54,423 square meters of residential, office, and commercial space and also a hotel. It presents two interconnected volumes of different heights. The

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   United States   In Greenpoint, the northernmost neighborhood of the New York City borough of Brooklyn, the development called Eagle + West presents two high-rises which complement one another and a smaller third building. The towers – rising 30 and 40 floors – inclu

Foster + Partners   China   In the Nanshan District of southwest Shenzhen, in southeastern China, two towers of 44 and 40 floors rise from podiums surrounded with vegetation. The new headquarters of the robotics company DJI, specialized in drone technology, presents cantileveri

Álvaro Siza   United States   The Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza has completed a residential high-rise at 611 West 56th Street in New York City, his first work in the United States. With a limestone cladding striking a contrast with its neighbors, the slender, 137-meter tower c

Adjaye Associates   United States   Located in the Lower Manhattan financial district, near Tribeca and South Street Seaport, 130 William will rise 240 meters tall, making a bold architectural statement and a unique addition to Manhattan’s iconic skyline. The mixed-use high-rise is des

David Chipperfield Architects   Germany   Situated on an exposed riverside site, the new mixed-use highrise acts as an entrance marker on the eastern edge of the Hafencity quarter. With a height of 245 meters, the tower is set to become the tallest building in Hamburg...

Ensamble Studio   United States   Designing a tower is often reduced to a boring exercise of cleverly resolving a central core and a more or less fancy facade. And between the two, a monotonous pile of identical floors, and identical spaces. Big Bang Towers explore the spatial and st

Zaha Hadid Architects   China   Designed by Zaha Hadid before she died on March 2016, Leeza SOHO contains the world’s tallest atrium (194,16 meters), which whirls around the building upward. Rising in the Chinese capital’s Fengtai business district, the tower contains 172,800 squar

Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF)   China   The firm Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) has completed a 400-meter skyscraper in the Houhau District of Shenzhen. Headquarters of the export company China Resources, the office tower is now the city’s third tallest building. Its 56 slender prefabricated stee

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture Conrad Gargett   Australia   The base of the building is conceived as a vertical mixed-use city open 24/7, which invites people inside from its large arcades. The BMW Experience Center, containing a cylindrical glass car lift, is located on the corner of Southbank and City Road.

Coop Himmelb(l)au Architectus   Australia   The main functions of the building are housed in four differentiated volumes articulated by recreational, public, and circulation interstitial spaces. The primary structure moves to the outside so the internal elements are minimized allowing maximum

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group FK   Australia   The project proposes two intertwined towers, formed by stacked volumes containing different types of programs; the voids between the two towers define a continuous three-dimensional promenade that evokes the urban pattern of Melbourne... [+]

MVRDV Woods Bagot   Australia   A sequence of public spaces interconnected by elevators, stairs, and escalators organize vertical circulation in the tower, with 359 meters in height and 76 floors containing apartments, cultural and leisure centers, a hotel, offices, and gardens...

MAD Architects Elenberg Fraser   Australia   A cantilevered structure crowns the tower offering panoramic views of Melbourne. The ETFE membrane facade presents different degrees of transparency, becoming translucent towards the edges to emulate the image of a cloud... [+]

UNStudio Cox   Australia   The use of vegetation, both in the public spaces that crown the podium and the tallest tower and in the private terraces of the high-rises, responds to the desire to promote biophilia and ensure thermal comfort, air quality, and noise absorption... [

David Chipperfield Architects   United States   This project is situated in Midtown Manhattan, facing the New York Public Library and overlooking Bryant Park. The building, rising 32 floors, consists of a hotel that extends to the 13th floor, with a further 18 floors of private residences. Both pr

Herzog & de Meuron   Switzerland   At a height of 205 meters, the design of the new tower – with office space for 3,100 employees – relates explicitly to the studio’s first high-rise for the pharmaceutical company in the Wettstein neighborhood, and is governed by the same volumetric c

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   United Kingdom   The London Bridge Tower, also known as the Shard, is a 72-public storey, mixed-use tower located beside London Bridge Station on the south bank of the River Thames. This project was a response to the urban vision of London Mayor Ken Livingstone and t

The Rise of Saudi Arabia

The Arabia Felix that supplied the ancient world with frankincense, myrrh, and cinnamon – in present-day Yemen – has moved to the northeast of the peninsula, towards what in the greater part of history was simply Arabia Deserta. In the 1930s, under t

Eduardo Prieto   That we Europeans profess a profound, historical ignorance of Albania is proven by the fact that when referring to the Balkan country, we always go to that adjective, ‘Balkan.’ As a good tailor’s box, Balkan serves to combine topics – mountains, reli

Perhaps because they came from trees, human beings have always had a yearning for heights. First there were the pyramids, the ziggurats, and the towers of Babel, stairs up which to climb to the heavens in pursuit of the gods. Then came the spires of

Bloomberg    James Tarmy   Advances in concrete, elevators, and engineering have created a new breed of buildings. Every apartment at 432 Park Ave. in New York City has a phenomenal view, but there’s one direction none of its residents can look: straight down. The 1,396-foot-h

Seattle will be crowning downtown with a 361-meter tower containing 1,080 residential units in the higher floors and coworking and retail spaces in the lower levels. Assigned to ODA, the New York architecture firm headed by Eran Chen, the project bea

The first building of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in Toronto – to be caried out in collaboration with the local firm Quadrangle – will also, when completed, be the city’s tallest, and perhaps the first Canadian sequel of the ‘supertall’ fever

The firm founded in London by the late Zaha Hadid and now headed by Patrik Schumacher has in the skyscraper district of Dubai just completed Hotel Opus ME, one of those buildings whose hollows perhaps cost more than their solid parts. Contorted to th

The death of the Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid three years ago, in 2016, did not bring an end to her thriving firm, as many said it would. On the contrary, it stayed on board a vigorous internationalization phase that has seen the construction o

When the giant financial services firm Lehman Brothers Holdings filed for bankruptcy in 2008, few in New York imagined that the worst financial crisis of the century would coincide with a skyscraper construction boom comparable even to the one that i

London will be studied as a model of urban transformation, thanks to the powers-that-be of financial capitalism. In less than twenty years, the decadent capital of the 1980s became a vibrant metropolis whose economic success was materialized in the e

130 William is the name of David Adjaye’s first skyscraper in New York City. The location is William Street, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. It is one of the oldest streets on the island. The project thus takes inspiration from the Big

The tower 277 Fifth, a work of Rafael Viñoly Architects, has reached its maximum height, all of 202 meters, and thus becomes one of the tallest in that relatively low-lying stretch of Manhattan. Located at the corner of 5th Avenue and 30th Street, th

Alejandro Bernabeu   Jorge Bernabeu   The world keeps growings taller. Standing out has always been the purpose of skyscrapers, and the dimension for this is height. Program, structure, layout, and circulations are strongly conditioned by the vertical dimension. The importance of height

The recently opened Shanghai Tower in the Pudong district of China’s economic capital, has taken its place as the second tallest building in the world, after the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Soaring 632 meters and 128 floors, the new supertall skyscraper –

The obsession for upscale apartments has reached a new peak in New York City with the tower at 432 Park Avenue that the Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly (with offices in New York, Palo Alto, London, Manchester, Abu Dhabi, and Buenos Aires) recently

When the Twin Towers of the original World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan were felled by fundamentalist fanaticism, many augured the end of high-rise construction. But the stubborn economy always contradicts predictions and soon came two new wave

Cynthia Davidson   A fruit of the demand – on the part of the elites of global capitalism – for luxury living, the latest crop of New York skyscrapers has changed the city’s skyline.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   New York remains the capital of the planet. The decline of the dollar and the exodus of corporate headquarters in the wake of 9-11 have somehow debilitated its hold as financial center, threatened moreover as it is by Asia’s rise and the agility of L

Ramón Araujo   Crises do not go with skyscrapers, yet the last years have seen them consolidating their presence to the limits of science fiction. A few decades ago they were an exception characteristic of American financial centers, rising only sporadically in Eur

Norman Foster ha ganado el concurso para construir un nuevo rascacielos en el corazón de Manhattan, con una propuesta que se ha impuesto finalmente a las de los otros tres finalistas: Richard Rogers, Rem Koolhaas y Zaha Hadid, en una convocatoria a l

Eduardo Prieto   La Torre de Babel es el leitmotiv de la muestra que recoge en el CaixaForum de Madrid la historia del rascacielos moderno, desde su primera versión en Chicago hasta su apogeo manierista y tecnológico en el mundo globalizado.