Towers for Tomorrow - Art Institute of Chicago's travelling exhibit on skyscrapers - Brief Article

Art in America, May, 2001 by Franz Schulze

To all appearances, it won't be long before the Petronas Towers are surpassed in height by one--most likely more than one--exceptionally lofty structure. The exhibition concentrates, almost obsessively, on the question of the world's tallest building, suggesting that technology virtually strives on its own for new solutions. This serves the PR agenda of nations, cities and individual clients (including even religious groups) furiously competing for a crown that seems to sit only temporarily on the head of each successive winner. In other words, there is a distinctly symbolic element in the flurry of tall buildings designed at the turn of this century. The Australian firm of Denton Corker Marshall has drawn up plans for a 1,820-foot tower in Melbourne, called the Grollo Tower by its rather immodest developer, Bruno Grollo, who speaks of it this way: "The Grollo Tower is the landmark Melbourne has needed for decades.... We have a seductively beautiful design, the world's most livable city desperately looking for an international landmark ... the technological skills, the confidence, and the vision to make it happen." Neither Grollo nor his backers, however, has yet come up with the requisite financing. In 1998, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, remembered by Beatles fans worldwide, envisioned a 144-floor, 2,222-foot-high building for Madhya Pradesh in India, to serve as the international center of Vedic learning. That endeavor proved to be more words than substance, a fate it shares with a number of other buildings covered in the exhibition. At the moment, the most startling work discussed in the catalogue (though not included in the show) is a Foster and Partners project called Millennium Tower, a behemoth whose 170 stories would rise 2,755 feet from an offshore site near Tokyo. That is almost twice the height of the Petronas Towers. It too will probably never be realized, but meanwhile the architects are using it as a kind of design laboratory in which various problems of outsized high-rise construction are being explored.

Any skyscraper that tall and meant for the Tokyo environs automatically raises the question of resistance to wind and earthquakes, an issue which a number of buildings in the exhibition have addressed. The Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, designed by the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and completed in 1999, contains an octagonal concrete core enclosed on four sides by pairs of "supercolumns," large-scale reinforced concrete piers connected to the core by outrigger trusses, that form a system meant to prevent the building's collapse. In Chicago's Park Tower (1999), by Lucien Lagrange and Associates, a 400-ton, steel-plated weight hung by a 32-foot cable in the highest stories, functions as a pendulum to offset the tendency of the building to sway in high winds. One of the most extraordinary projects, the Torre Mayor, scheduled to be finished in 2002 in Mexico City, confronts the challenge of achieving a height of 738 feet on ground notorious for its vigorous seismic activity. The exhibition catalogue describes the means employed by the architects, Zeidler Roberts Partnership of Toronto: "Torre Mayor has been designed to float, carefully balancing the above and below ground masses of the building components. The foundation of the tower is a combined pile-mat system, with piles that are connected by a reinforced concrete raft supporting the building's load on the hard layer of Mexico City's bedrock. To provide flexibility in the case of an earthquake, a system of pistons, three feet in diameter, placed at the intersection of the diagonal bracing along the perimeter of the tower, has been invented to simultaneously dampen the dynamic loads and maintain the integrity of the facade."