Lausanne World Pulse – Learning from Ants: Missionary Teams and the Skyscraper Analogy
By Justin Long
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Taipei 101 was the first building to break the |
Skyscraper Analogy
Skyscrapers are huge buildings. They must be at least five hundred feet tall to be given the title. For skyscrapers, wind is usually a greater problem than the weight of the building itself. Most are built using steel and reinforced concrete. The Empire State Building, the World Trade Center and the Sears Tower (all located in the United States) each briefly held the record as the tallest skyscrapers in the world. The Petronas Towers (452 meters high) in Malaysia took the record in 1998, but it was surpassed by Taipei 101 (509 meters high) in Taiwan in 2004.
Taipei 101 was the first (and currently only) building to break the half-kilometer mark in height. It opened on New Year’s Eve 2004 as one of the most advanced buildings ever built. It features one-gigabit Internet connections and the world’s fastest doubledecker elevators (running at 37.5 miles per hour; able to go from the main floor to the eighty-ninth floor in thirty-nine seconds). A mass damper on the eighty-eighth floor can reduce up to half the tower’s movements, stabilizing it against earthquakes, typhoons and wind. It is designed to withstand events such as catastrophic earthquakes and super typhoons that occur only once every millennia. It has over 214,000 square meters of office space, 77,500 square meters of retail space (with a six-floor retail mall) and seventy-three thousand square meters of parking space. There was some concern that its’ sheer weight might re-open an ancient underground fault that could cause future earthquakes.
The interior of the skyscraper was designed by a feng shui master (this is Asia, after all) and is filled with symbols of financial success. The exterior design represents eight gold ingots, the ancient royal currency of China. Each “ingot” has eight floors. The number eight sounds like “earn fortune” in the Chinese language. And someone spent one. The entire project cost US$1.7 billion from start to finish.
Taipei 101—like all other skyscrapers—is well known. They are huge towers that draw the eye for miles around. They become well-known “addresses.” Their fame can bring them good publicity—and bad publicity. As we have all seen, it can bring outright hostility. Skyscrapers are unavoidably very public.
Taipei 101 may soon be surpassed by several other buildings planned for 2008, including the International Commerce Center in Hong Kong, the Fordham Spire in Chicago, the Shanghai World Financial Center and the Freedom Tower in New York.
None of these, however, are the most likely future “tallest building.” The next record-holder—at least, according to its promotional literature—belongs to the Middle East. “At the crossroads of India and the Middle East, equidistant between Europe and Asia, Dubai is fast becoming the financial and cultural hub for over a billion people. At the center of that hub stands the most exclusive address in the world.” The exact planned height of the Burj Dubai is kept secret, but when it is finished in 2008 it will probably be at least seven hundred meters (2,296 feet—nearly half a mile) high. “Only a privileged group of people will call it home,” says the promotional material.
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