Katsuyuki Takeuchi points out the window of his 33rd-floor office at the muddy pit where construction of the world's tallest building ground to a halt in 1997.
If Mori Building Co has its way, the site may soon be home again to cranes and pile-drivers. Plans for the 94-floor, 460m Shanghai World Financial Center are being revived, even after terrorists felled the World Trade Center in New York. The new version may be even higher.
"We have no plans to postpone our schedule," said Takeuchi, general manager of Shanghai World Financial Center Co, a unit of the Japanese builder. "The earliest we can start construction is by the end of 2002. We hope to complete the building before the Beijing Olympics."
Barclays Plc and HSBC Holdings Plc are reconsidering designs for new London buildings, and US banks are reviewing plans to move into an unfinished Hong Kong skyscraper, after attacks that killed thousands. As companies around the world focus on the safety and utility of skyscrapers, however, buildings in Asia are stretching ever higher.
Hong Kong is building 88-floor and 102-floor skyscrapers that will in turn become the city's tallest. In Taiwan, two towers are in the works, each more than 100 stories. Asia is also home to the globe's highest, the Petronas Towers in Malaysia.
What explains the building frenzy, even after New York's 110-story twin towers, the world's tallest on their completion three decades ago, were demolished by hijacked airplanes?
Perhaps it all boils down to hubris.
"Skyscrapers symbolize wealth and economic power, a sign of modern civilization, in the same way as what the pyramids are to Egypt," said James Law, a Hong Kong architect who runs his own firm. "A growing country like China wants to show it has caught up with modern Western economies by building skyscrapers."
In Shanghai's new financial center, Pudong, Mori is in some ways back to the drawing board with the revived World Finance Center.
The privately held Japanese developer halted work three years ago amid a squabble with Chinese authorities about the design and, more to the point, because funding dried up during Asia's financial crisis.
Designed by New York-based Kohn Pederson Fox Associates, the prototype earned China's ire because a 50m hole at the top bore a resemblance, authorities said, to the Japanese flag. Mori, which said the hole was to relieve wind pressure, bowed to sensitivities about wartime atrocities and added an observation deck whose railing cut a line across the hole.
China wants new skyscrapers in Pudong, little more than rice paddies only a decade ago, to add to a glittering array of high-rise hotels and offices that it calls the nation's new Wall Street.
Across the Huangpu River from the Bund, Shanghai's 1930s-era hub, Pudong is already home to banks like HSBC, partly because the government forced them to move there in order to obtain highly coveted licenses to lend in the local currency.
Preliminary construction on the Shanghai tower began in August 1997, after 30 months of negotiations. About 2,000 steel beams were driven 80m into soil to anchor the structure.
Then worked stopped. It will take four years to complete once work resumes, Takeuchi said.
Mori isn't just trying again -- this time, the company wants to build even higher. The company is thinking of adding another 40m to the tower's height, making it higher than Petronas, Takeuchi said. He brushed aside the threat of a terrorist attack.
"What happened in New York is a tragedy," Takeuchi said. "But in China, it wouldn't happen."
He may be correct: China keeps a tight rein on internal dissidents, making the chance of a terrorist attack on a scale big enough to bring down a major building slim to the extreme. And it's the US that appears to be a target of the attacks, not China -- and not, so far, any other Asian nation.
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