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

Herzog & de Meuron   United States   This skyscraper soaring 250 meters above street level rises as a contradiction to the anonymity, uniformity, and repetition that reigns among the residential towers which have been going up in recent years, proposing instead a return to the individua

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group   Germany   Downtown Frankfurt mixes medium-rise blocks – instrumental in forming clear-cut and dynamic public spaces – with high-rises, a combination that offers density and a skyline echoing the Taunus Mountains to the north. Omniturm joins this heterogeneous

SHOP   United States   The setbacks and astonishing svelteness of the skyscraper are the result of an unconventional way of interpreting ordinances about letting daylight reach the streets of the Big Apple.

Perkins + Will Architects   United States   This tower rises as a new type of urban ecosystem, one with collective recreational spaces that have the effect of generating a social and interactive community within the city.

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group   United States   With its facets opening to bring in light and search for views, the building makes the most of the advantages of the European courtyard block and the American skyscraper.

CedraRuddy   United States   The combination of a glass- and bronze-clad shaft and a series of cantilevered cubic volumes breaks the symmetry of the complex and gives it a lighter appearance.

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.

Ramón Araujo   A pesar de que la técnica ha hecho posible una nueva generación de rascacielos más altos, el precio medioambiental y económico que se paga por ello sigue siendo muy alto.

Iñaki Ábalos   En un mundo marcado por la competencia global, la apuesta por la identidad determina los nuevos rascacielos en su fructífero devenir desde lo tectónico a lo termodinámico.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The economic storm is marked on skylines with the usual crop of twilight towers: financial wuthering heights. As in the Great Depression of 1929, or in the one after the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, the Great Recession triggered by the collapse of Le