![]() These buildings are alternately described as “needle towers” or “toothpick skyscrapers” (though not every superslim is a supertall). Some supertalls have an even more futuristic designation: superslim. ![]() In 2019 alone, developers added more supertalls than had existed prior to the year 2000 there are now a couple hundred worldwide, including Dubai’s 163-story Burj Khalifa (a hypodermic needle aimed at space), Tianjin’s 97-floor CTF Finance Centre (reminiscent of a drill bit boring the clouds), and, encroaching on my sky, Manhattan’s 84-floor Steinway Tower (a luxury condominium resembling the love child of a dustbuster and a Mach3 razor). First supertalls were impossible, then a rarity. There are skyscrapers, and then there are supertalls, often defined as buildings more than 300 meters in height, but better known as the cloud-puncturing sci-fi towers that look like digital renderings, even when you’re staring at them from the sidewalk. “All we’ve done in the 20 years since is build even taller.” “There were all sorts of symposiums and public statements that we’re never going to build tall again,” one former architect told The Guardian in 2021. Tall buildings that were in the works got scaled down or canceled on the assumption that soaring towers were too risky to be built or occupied. After 9/11, experts concluded that skyscrapers were finished. We’re living through the birth of a new species of skyscraper that not even architects and engineers saw coming. It was so tall, so thin, I began to doubt that the cross-hatching of metal beams could actually be a building. It rose above the brick building, then over the windows of neighboring apartments, walling off precious blue behind it. ![]() It couldn’t possibly get much taller.īut the skeleton kept stretching. When the metal skeleton of a skyscraper materialized beneath the crane, I told myself that the new building would top out soon. I consoled myself about the crane with the flimsy logic I once used after discovering a bedbug: It’ll go away! Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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