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

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

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... [+]

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

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... [

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.

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   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

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

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

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 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

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 –

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.