Essays on the Tall Building & the City.

The tall building is barely a century old, but it has transformed older cities and shaped new settlements around the world. In Asia and the Middle East, a forest of high rises has risen in the space of a generation, from bare ground or in place of humble villages. Behind the seeming chaos of tangled roads and unrelated buildings, is an underlying order and a hierarchy of scale that every city aspires to. Unlike some smaller works of architecture, tall buildings contain highly technical systems which are replicated and costly. These buildings have the capability of generating significant financial return and there is a global community of real estate investors constantly surveying potentially beneficial locations around the world. While the uniformity of this global industrial sector might suggest uniform outcomes, the regions in which opportunities exist are varied, each with its own history, governance and economic marketplace. It is this dialectic between universal sameness and regional distinction which provides the narrative for this book and informs our observation of the important similarities and differences of tall buildings in our world cities.