11. Ten Greatest Skyscrapers Never Built

The world is full of spectacular skyscrapers. Well, maybe not "full of", but at least "dotted with". The Burj Khalifa, Shanghai World Financial Centre, Taipei 101, Petronas Towers, Chrysler Building, Shard, John Hancock Center -- the list goes on and on.

 

Ironically, some of the greatest buildings ever designed have never made it off the drawing board. They flamed brightly but briefly in the minds of great architects. Then they were squelched into the ground by economic downturns, developer bankruptcies, small-minded municipal officials and city councils, government corruption and a variety of other causes.

But let's, for a moment, contemplate what our world might look like today if the following works of WOWchitecture had been built:

 

Norman Foster's India Tower in Mumbai would have been part sculpture, part hotel and fully spectacular:

via Foster and Associates

 

It would have been a silver quiver pointed to the stars. The tower would have risen 2,356-feet or 126-storeys into the sky, giving Mumbai a prominent place on the world architectural map. And it would have given India something more modern to put on its tourist brochures than a 360-year-old kitschy Moghul love monument. But it was not meant to be. Construction began in 2010, was put on hold in 2011, and killed off for good in 2013 due to the hotel chain's financial problems.

 

What Foster couldn't do for Mumbai, he also couldn't do for Moscow. Russia Tower, a 134-storey, $2-billion, rocket-shaped building, never made it to lift-off:
 

via Foster and Associates

 

Russia Tower was supposed to be the focal point of a brand new hub of skyscrapers in Moscow's business district. A cornerstone was laid in 2007, but a couple of years later it became a victim of the global recession. The remainder of the business hub is currently nearing completion.

 

Despite being virtually unknown outside the world of architecture (because much of his career was spent under the SOM brand), Adrian Smith is, in my opinion, the greatest designer of skyscrapers who ever lived. He designed the "world's tallest building" the Burj Khalifa; the future world's tallest, the Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia; Chicago's Trump Tower; and a large proportion of the few decent-looking skyscrapers in China.

Despite these credentials, Smith has seen his share of buildings die on the drawing board. Like Dubai 1, a complex of three futuristic skyscrapers, connected by a series of glass sky bridges and entered by via a canal:

via AS + GG

And the Dancing Dragons, once planned for Seoul, South Korea:

via AS + GG

 

My favourite part of this project was the overlapping glass panels that provided the illusion of scale-like skin. Alas, everyone knows that there are no dragons in today's world. Not the flying kind. Not the built kind.

If dragons can't dance, then neither can buildings. Even if you're Zaha Hadid trying to add some whimsy to the Dubai skyline:

Via Zaha Hadid Architects

 

The Dancing Towers, three animated and fluidly flowing buildings unveiled in 2006, we're supposed to be at the heart of Dubai's business bay development. A hole was dug, management changed hands, the hole was filled in, and by 2012 the three dancers were deader than Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Ginger Rogers.

 

I must admit, I'd never heard of American architect John Portman until I came across his magnificent 151-storey Incheon Tower planned for South Korea:

via John Portman

 

The 2,000-foot colossus was supposed to be the focal point for a 2,000-acre $17-billion residential, office and hotel complex. It was scheduled for completion in 2010, then 2011 and finally downsized to 101 stories for 2014. But South Korea, where great architectural dreams go to die, has now buried another one.

In contrast to Portman, I've long been familiar with the work of Santiago Calatrava. His BCE Place atrium is one of the architectural gems of my birthplace and long-time hometown, Toronto. His greatest work - a complex of futuristic building called the City of Arts an Sciences - sits on proud display in my new hometown and Calatrava's birthplace, Valencia, Spain.

Calatrava tried to add a little of his futuristic fairy dust to New York in the form of 80 South Street:

 

via Santiago Calatrava



The building was to consist of 12 four-storey cubes, each cube for sale to an individual owner. The cubes we're put on the market starting at $US 29-million, with the top cube costing $US 59-million. When none of the cubes sold and the real estate market went bust in 2008, the project was cancelled.

Most architects these days like to lend an element of green to their buildings. For Mad Architects' Yangson Ma, the green element is the building. His 90-storey Urban Forest, proposed for the city of Chongqing, was basically a high-rise public park with glassed-in mixed use spaces. Critics compared it to a giant stack of plates. But I liked to think of it as an over-sized Dagwood sandwich with too much lettuce:

via MAD Architects

Unfortunately for Ma, the project was cancelled when Chongqing's top official was imprisoned.

The next project on my list doesn't involve skyscrapers, but I just had to include something by bad-boy British architect, Will Alsop. While I'm sure they don't keep statistics on this kind of thing, Alsop may hold the record for the highest percentage of structures designed but not built. His use of brilliant colour and avant-garde forms are too much for most folk, though I'm, clearly not one of them.

Alsop's design for revitalizing the waterfront in the British town of Middlesbrough was at the leading edge of not only architecture but environmental sustainability as well. It would have been the largest zero-carbon development in the UK. Unfortunately, the development firm was killed off by its parent company and Alsop's baby was thrown out along with the bath water.

Finally we come back to Calatrava, whose 150-storey, 2,000-ft. leviathan in  Chicago - the Spire - was to be the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere:
 

via Santiago Calatrava

 

A sizeable round hole was dug on the Chicago riverfront for the spiralling white tower. Then, in 2008, the global economic crisis struck and Chicago was hit particularly hard. The Irish developer behind the project, Kelleher, went bankrupt, leaving the building owing tens of millions of dollars, and no one in the Windy City willing to pick up the ball.

 

Today, the Spire is the classic example of Zombie Architecture - not exactly alive but not exactly dead either. Another development firm has tentatively struck a deal with Kelleher and key creditors. The agreement would resolve the company’s bankruptcy, pay outstanding claims in full and theoretically enable the behemoth project to move forward. The deal won't be fully worked out until late summer at the earliest. Meanwhile the cost of construction, once estimated at $1.5-billion, grows larger by the day. Personally I think this zombie is going to take a bullet to the head before it staggers much more forward.
  There, that's my list of the Ten Greatest Skyscrapers Never Built. You may not agree with all of them, but I hope you'll acknowledge that our world would be a more dynamic and exciting place if at least some of them had seen the light of day.

Now it's your turn. Can you think of any great skyscrapers that I've left off the list? If so please click on the word "comments" at the end of this post and give me your suggestions. I'll give serious consideration to revising the list based on your recommendations.

10. Sculptures that Look Like Aliens

It's been quite a week here at WOWchitecture. My blog just celebrated its two-month anniversary and blew past its 2,000th page view. I now have readers in 71 countries and every continent except Antarctica!!!

That may not put me up there with Katy Perry and her 50-million Twitter followers, but it's far more than I ever expected. Thank you all. Especially those who come back week-after-week to spend a little time here.

Today, I'm going to do something a little different. In my very first post, I promised that WOWchitecture would not only showcase "architecture with attitude" but also many other decorative arts. Today, the spotlight will shine on digital surrealism. Specifically, MY digital surrealism. Here are a few highlights from my new photo series: Sculptures that Look Like Aliens.

The first one is my partner Heather's favourite, an extra-terrestrial we discovered while holidaying in Guadalajara, Mexico:

The "alien" is actually the top half of a bronze chair created by sensational surrealist sculptor - and Guadalajara native son - Alejandro Colunga. Like better-known countryman Guillermo del Toro, Colunga's work draws on childhood memories of myths, fables and strange creatures. The metalwork is his. But the photo and colourful interpretation are mine. Here's another one inspired by Colunga's work:

In a similar vein, my favourite aliens can be found on the roof-top of Barcelona's renowned Casa Mila (better known as La Pedrera - The Rock Quarry) created by the incomparable Catalan architect, Antoni Gaudi. The "aliens" were actually greyish-white before I decided to add a little life to them:

Gaudi wasn't the only Catalan with visions of aliens dancing in his head. Jean Miro took a more whimsical approach, as illustrated by this cute little guy at the Miro museum, also in Barcelona:

And this guy, at the same museum:

But you probably wouldn't want to run into Italian Mimo Paledino's spaceman at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice. I think he may be part mummy.

Well, that's it for my chosen art form - digital surrealism. You've probably already seen some of my work at the very beginning of this blog, and scattered in among my posts. If you'd like to see even better digital surrealism, sign up for Google+ (if you haven't already) and join the Surrealism or Digital Art communities.You'll see some fantastic work, "meet" friendly (and, occasionally, surreal) people and have hours of fun. 

9. London: Beehive Kick-Starts Renewal

In 1998, the city of London decided it needed a landmark building to kick-start its bedraggled area south of the Thames. The man chosen to design a new city hall was England's favourite-son architect, Sir Norman Foster.

Foster, now 78, wasn't regarded as an "out there" architect like contemporary Frank Gehry, or later-to-come mavericks Santiago Calatrava and Zaha Hadid. He had a global reputation as a superb craftsman who liked to use a lot of glass and open spaces to give his buildings a lighter-than-air look.

Foster went to the drawing board, or rather computer, and what he came back with raised more than a few eyebrows. It was a blue geodesic dome, not unlike those of his friend, Buckminster Fuller, except that it looked like it had been blown off-centre by a gale-force wind. The public quickly dubbed it, "The Beehive".

Others were not so kind. Former Mayor Ken Livingstone called it "a glass testicle". Current mayor, Boris Johnson referred to it as "the glass gonad". And yet there are so many reasons why London's city hall qualifies as a work of WOWchitecture:

It looks fabulous at night, the only time its magnificent helical staircase can be clearly seen from the outside.



Image via Foster and Partners

The spiral staircase itself is a work of art. It runs for 800-metres, curving its way through all 10 above-grade floors to the top of the building. The platform there is open to the public, providing citizens with a transparent view of the activities of their elected officials.



Photo by DAVID ILLIF. License CC-BY-SA 3.0

More than half of the space is public plaza, offering great exhibition space for art. In this case it's larger-than-life Les Paul guitars, painted and autographed by famous folk and sold off for charity.

The building provides a great backdrop for tourist photos. This is especially true if you're a digital artist - like me.

It offers a great platform for viewing Foster's totemic skyscraper, "The Gherkin" on the north side of the Thames.

And finally, the strategy worked! The south side of the Thames has been a "beehive" of growth (pun intended). It even has buildings like this:

That's Renzo Piano's building, The Shard. But that's a story for another day.

8. Bhaktapur, Nepal: Ancient Palaces and Pagodas

(I originally posted this in February 2014. I'm re-posting it so you can see the massive loss of cultural heritage caused by the earthquake in Nepal. Bhaktapur was largely levelled by the quake.)

Back in the sixties, Nepal was considered the hippest hangout for backpackers and dropouts alike. I didn't make it there in the sixties, in fact, I didn't visit Nepal until a couple of years ago when I reached my 60s!

By then, a lot had changed. Cafés no longer served up hash brownies and marijuana  milkshakes. Many hand-crafted souvenirs had been replaced by mass-produced kitsch from China. And Kathmandu's once-clear mountain air had become amongst the worst in the world. The Himalayas might have been nearby, but there was no way you could confirm it with the human eye.
 
Still, Nepal offered what it had always offered -- small villages resplendent with ancient palaces, pagodas, temples and squares. My favourite was Bhaktapur, Nepal's former capital from the 11th-15th century. Located 20 kilometres east of Kathmandu, Bhaktapur was a major pit-stop on the historic overland trade route from India to Tibet.

The focal point in Bhaktapur is Durbar Square. Author E.A. Powell once wrote, “were there nothing else in Nepal save the Durbar Square of Bhaktapur, it would still be amply worth making a journey halfway round the globe to see." A bit of hyperbole there, but there are more than enough WOWs in Durbar Square to thrill the avid traveller, photographer, architecture buff, artist, or history lover.

The Golden Gate is the entry way to the 15th century palace of 55 windows. The Gate will dazzle your eyes with its pantheon of golden Hindu Gods and symbols.

The five-tiered Nyatapola Temple, built in 1702, is Nepal's tallest pagoda temple:

The Temple, dedicated to the Hindu Goddess Lakshmi, is fronted by five pairs of stone figures: legendary Rajput wresters-Jaimal and Pata; a pair of elephants; a pair of lions; a pair of griffons; and a pair of tantric goddesses known as Singhini and Toyahagrini. Each pair is supposed to be 10 times stronger than the one below it.

Similar, but with a different set of stone figures leading to its door, is the Siddhi Lakshmi Temple:

The Vastala Durga was built in 1696:

The Durga appears to be adorned with images of the Hebrew Star of David:

It's not a Star of David, though. It's the ancient Hindu Hexagram. The HH is a six-pointed star made up of two intertwined triangles. One triangle is pointed up to the heavens, the other is pointed below. Sort of like a Star of David. Only not.

The Bhairabnath Mandir, is dedicated to the Hindu god of terror. Its entrance is protected by golden lions - both large and mini - and a number of shrines:

 

The Square contains numerous sculptures, with the most venerated being King Bhupatindra Malla in prayer position: 

  

Today, after a couple of decades of instability due to Maoist insurrections, royal assassinations, and parliamentary stalemates, Nepal is regaining its prominence on the global tourism circuit. But here's a word to the wise: if you go - and you really should - make sure you enter and exit the country by land. Nepal's aviation industry, never good, is getting worse by the day. It ought to be shut down completely until Nepal can figure out how to safely fly people into, out of, and around the country.

This past weekend, a Nepal Airlines flight from Pokhara crashed shortly after take-off, killing all 18 aboard. In December, the EU put all of Nepal's airlines on a blacklist and banned them from flying to the EU on safety grounds. According to the BBC, since 1949 - the year the first aircraft landed in Nepal - there have been more than 70 different crashes involving planes and helicopters, in which more than 700 people have been killed.

You may want to make it to Nirvana, but, trust me, it's not the way you'll want to get there.