Earlier this month word come out of Chicago—specifically, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture—that His Royal Highness Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, the nephew of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, planned to build the world’s tallest building. The Kingdom Tower, as it’s called for now, will top out at an almost incomprehensible 3280 feet. That’s roughly two-thirds of a mile.  (Frank Lloyd Wright’s not looking so wacky after all.)

How exactly are we supposed to greet this news? Does the world need a 3280-foot tower? Did it need the 2717-foot Burj Khalifa in Dubai, designed by Smith and Gill while at SOM? Of course not: super tall buildings aren’t shaped by profit—upturned boxes and their attached casinos are created for that—they’re shaped by hubris, pride, and aggressive symbolism.

The good news: this is an extraordinarily gorgeous rendering. The laws of physics dictate that absurdly tall buildings taper as they reach for the heavens. This presents some wonderful sculptural possibilities; ones that Smith and Gill have taken advantage of here. There’s also something oddly beautiful about super tall buildings, in the abstract: they photograph well, they look awe-inspiring from the window of an airplane, or the front seat of a car headed in from the airport. It’s at street level where the idea loses its romance. They’re great, in other words, until they become real.

The bad news here: the symbolism seems particularly ill-timed. With world financial markets tottering and the hopes of an Arab Spring dashed, along comes the autocratic and oil rich Saudi royal family to sponsor the next world’s tallest building. (It is literally one of those records made to be broken.) My reaction isn’t wow—we know they can do it, they’re structural geniuses—but why?

At the newly unveiled Web site Shape Vancouver 2050, users are given a digital model of the Vancouver skyline, the ability to extrude buildings upwards, and a visual gauge of the resulting effects on the city’s downtown. As the user drags the digital towers higher and population density increases, meters at the bottom of the screen go up too—energy saved, carbon use curbed, dollars added to the city coffers.

It’s a neat tool, if a bit of a one-liner: the more tall buildings you insert, the better things get; make nearly all the buildings tall and you’ve created an “Urban Paradise!” (Leave most of the buildings as low-rises and you’re chided for fostering sprawl.) It’s not entirely clear whether the site’s creators—the architecture firm Perkins +Will and the developer Concord Pacific—intended Shape Vancouver as an honest solicitation of planning input from the public, or a sneaky way to educate (or indoctrinate?) residents in the environmental benefits of high density. Either way, their message is clear: Want a better Vancouver? Build tall.

Last month, everyone was talking about Las Vegas’s CityCenter, the $8.5 billion, 18-million-square-foot hotel-and-entertainment complex that now seems like the last gasp of a rapidly-receding era of starchitect cache and real-estate hubris. Well, not quite the last gasp—this morning another emblem of aughties excess officially opened in the UAE: Adrian Smith and SOM’s Burj Dubai—the world’s tallest building!—rising 160-plus stories above a city-state that is now reeling from plummeting property values and crippling debt.

Related: In 2007, Stephen Zacks took a look at the serious ambitions behind Dubai’s insane rate of development in “Beyond the Spectacle.”

Images: © OMA/Ole Scheeren 2009

Bangkok might not be the first Asian capital one thinks of when talk turns to high-quality international architecture (it might not be the second or third one, either), but that could just make it ideal for a project like MahaNakhon, OMA’s dazzling 77-story skyscraper slated to begin construction this fall. The MahaNakhon project is headed by OMA’s Ole Scheeren (Scheeren was also the lead architect on Beijing’s CCTV headquarters), and its look and sheer size are clearly intended to make a statement about new design and development possibilities in Thailand. The building will feature seven floors of retail (including cafes and restaurants), residential units (200, managed by the Ritz-Carlton), a hotel (the Bangkok Edition, a collaboration between Marriott International and Ian Schrager), and, of course, a Sky Bar. A public plaza and outdoor atrium at the foot of the building will connect MahaNakhon with the Cube, a seven-story leisure-and-dining complex, also designed by OMA.

In renderings, the skyscraper looks like it’s been eaten away from the outside; irregularly stacked terraces form a sort of pixilated helix, carved into the otherwise unbroken façade of the building. The idea, according to the designers, is to expose the insides of the building to the city around it—to reduce the skyscraper’s natural insularity and promote some type of integration between the tower and its surroundings. OMA has a history of carefully considering urban settings in their designs and, socially, the emphasis here on public space and connections to mass transit hubs is laudable. Typologically, OMA’s skyscraper doesn’t exactly blend in, but, then again, maybe that’s the point.

More images of MahaNakhon (Thai for “great metropolis”) after the jump. Read more…

Today, the Sears Tower is officially being rechristened Willis Tower, in honor of its new principle tenant, the London insurance broker Willis Group Holdings. (The Sears company itself has not occupied the building since 2004.) Although newspapers and blogs have been busy reporting on the inevitable backlash from Chicago residents, who insist they will always call it the Sears, I think that Willis’s claim that people will eventually accept the name is probably correct. Old habits die hard, but die they do—just look at the MetLife Building. And while I  sympathize with the folks over at the online petition It’s the SEARS Tower, I also can’t help thinking that, hey, it could be a lot worse. Willis is a mercifully neutral, unoffensive name. Chicagoans should feel lucky that they’re not waking up this morning to the new Tropicana Tower, Time Warner Cable Tower, or Margaritaville Enterprises Tower.

Move over, Het Strijkijzer. There’s a new darling of the high-rise set. Tokyo’s Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower has just been named the skyscraper of the year by Emporis, a German-based Web site that compiles data on very tall buildings. The Gherkin-esque tower, designed by Kenzo Tange Associates, bested Seoul’s Boutique Monaco (Mass Studies; void-pocked mixed-use block) and the Shanghai World Financial Center (Kohn Pedersen Fox; giant bottle-cap opener) to join such past winners as Calatrava’s Turning Torso, Norman Foster’s Hearst Building, and the aforementioned Het Strijkijzer, a Flatiron look-alike in The Hague. The 668-foot-tall Cocoon is one of a pair of skyscrapers that Tange designed for Mode Gakuen, a trade school in Tokyo’s Shinjuku ward.

Given the rosy outlook for global architecture and real estate, we can safely predict that next year’s winner will be a two-story Home Depot on the New Jersey Turnpike.

It’s a perfect metaphor for the teetering global real-estate market: Capital Gate, the glassy tower at the center of Abu Dhabi’s $2.2 billion Capital Centre development, has just been submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records as the “world’s most inclined building,” according to the press release. (I prefer “leaningest.”)

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