These unresolved issues still linger in the rush to develop a new urban world, where the United Nations estimated in June that more than half the world’s population now lives in cities. Given the recent building boom, critics and theorists have written relatively little on the skyscraper, especially outside of the contexts of the WTC and such places as Dubai or Guangzhou. No wonder Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, which turns 30 years old next year, still reigns as provocative reading in architecture schools. Even Koolhaas builds more than he writes today—and some of his more recent proposals for skyscrapers, like that in Jersey City, certainly don’t inspire confidence. In 2002, Ken Yeang published his Reinventing the Skyscraper, A Vertical Theory of Urban Design, which lays down a fairly ambitious model of the skyscraper as an environmentally responsible ecosystem, a nonhomogenous collection of programmed and vegetated spaces that theoretically approximates the functions of a city for a globally connected Internet culture. Yeang’s writing and conceptual designs have appeal, especially among the green set, but like Koolhaas, the ratio of finished project to unbuilt proposal remains too low to gauge its effects outside of vanity projects. This is, after all, still serious architecture, with a capital A, not your everyday Shanghai business park. As Yeang said at a recent lecture in New York, “Low-energy design is a lifestyle issue.” And not everyone can afford lifestyle.
7 World Trade Center New York, New York In a dry run for its forthcoming Freedom Tower, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill design a jewel-like tall building that is already rewriting the book on safety.
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