China’s $1BN Skyscraper Mistake NH

China’s $1BN Skyscraper Mistake NH

What’s the difference between a circle and a square? Before you answer, you should know that this was perhaps the single most important question faced by William Pettison, an American architect in Shanghai. Halfway through constructing one of the world’s tallest buildings, work had to stop so that it could be redesigned.
A city, in fact, an entire country, demanded that this circular opening become a square. Why? Well, the story of this skyscraper illustrates perhaps more than any other the symbolic power of tall buildings. How they can transcend the steel and concrete they’re made of and become something of even greater meaning. This isn’t just the story of a building.
It’s the story of the largest migration in human history. The story of the men who built modern-day China. The story of the race to become the world’s next superpower. This is the Shanghai World Financial Center. Almost the world’s tallest building. The television studios looking on and 91,000 people inside Beijing’s national stadium when the lights darkened and the party was ready to begin.
The China of the 21st century has not been a country to shy away from grand statements, nor has it been shy at building lots and lots of enormous buildings. In just two decades, China built more than eight times the number of skyscrapers that America constructed in a century. Today, the country has well over 3,300 skyscrapers that are 150 m tall or taller.
The United States has just under 900. Of the 10 tallest buildings in the world, five of them are in China. So, why doesn’t China have the tallest? Well, they very nearly and technically did. But to tell you that story, we have to take you back in time. Before the mega cities and the 3,000 skyscrapers, back to when China was a very different place.
Look at this devastating day for the market. Two things happened at once. The American economy crashed, the worst drop in Wall Street history, and China’s began to boom. In the US, it was called Black Monday. In a single day, the Dow Jones dropped 22% and $1.7 trillion dollars was lost worldwide. In the depressed economy that followed 1987 Wall Street stock market crash and the savings and loan crisis, the real estate investment was really drying up in the US.
So large firms look to new centers for business and certainly China was clear was emerging as one of those booming economies. While much of the globe was flailing in the aftermath of Black Monday, China was booming. The country was opening up to international markets, while rural farmers and workers were moving to China’s cities on a scale never before seen.
The migration from the late 1980s and through the 1990s, the largest migration in human history, about 300 million people. And so that modernization and urbanization process had to build an enormous amount of space of housing for business for offices and to compete on the world stage. Cities were grown almost overnight.
The future was being built and it was being built fast. Beijing was the political center. Shanghai was the future