A STORM BREWS WHERE SKYSCRAPERS BRUSH THE HEAVENS
CHANGSHA, China — China is slowing down, but the buildings keep going up — until now.
China is home to 60 of the world’s 100 tallest buildings under construction. But the skyward aspirations of Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, have inspired incredulity tinged with hostility.
Broad Group, a manufacturer based in Changsha, has been planning to erect the world’s tallest building here this winter, and in record time. The 202-story Sky City is supposed to be assembled in only four months from factorybuilt modules of steel and concrete early next year on the city’s outskirts. The digging of foundations began on July 20.
But the project’s scale and speed have set off a burst of national introspection about whether Chinese municipal leaders and developers have gone too far in their increasingly manic reach for the skies.
“The vanity of some local government officials has determined the skylines of cities,” an editorial in the People’s Daily newspaper, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, said this month.
The tycoon behind the project said in a telephone interview that he had ordered a pause in work at the site while waiting for further approvals from regulators in Beijing.
“It’s because of all the concern in the media and on the Internet, the government is a little wary and has slowed down the process,” said Zhang Yue, the chairman of the Broad Group.
But he vowed to finish the building, saying that he expected a delay of no more than two to three months, with completion in June or July next year instead of the original plan of finishing it in April.
“No matter how high the obstacles, I will for certain overcome them to make sure this project is completed,” Zhang said .
He declined to identify who in Beijing had delayed his project but said that he had not been asked to make any tweaks to the design.
David Scott, a prominent structural engineer in London who has worked on many extremely tall buildings, said regulatory delays are periodic problems for such projects all over the world but could usually be overcome.
Local officials say that while they have transferred the land for Sky City to Broad Group and have been installing electricity and water lines for the project, final approval for the project is still “in progress” from building safety experts in Beijing.
The blueprints for Sky City call for a stack of long, skinny rectangles that taper to a narrow top, like a very tall and angular wedding cake. It bears a blocky resemblance to the 110-story Willis Tower in Chicago, formerly the Sears Tower, which was the world’s tallest building until 1998 but is now being left in the shade by numerous rivals.
Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Chongqing — each similar in population to metropolitan New York — are now finishing one building apiece that will top the Willis Tower.
Ambitious local officials, together with state-owned companies and state-owned banks, stand behind most of these projects, raising fears that taxpayers may eventually pick up the bill if projects prove uneconomical.
“If you let the market decide, I don’t think a lot of these tall buildings would proceed,” said Chau Kwong Wing, a professor of real estate and construction at Hong Kong University.
Despite public concerns, there is no sign so far that any of the many very tall buildings under construction in China has been blocked by regulators in Beijing, he and Zhang both noted.
Sky City is the most ambitious project of all, and so it has become the lightning rod for criticism of the trend. Chinese media have been openly skeptical about the project, questioning its safety, construction speed and the wisdom of relying on prefabricated modules.
But work nonetheless continued this month at the site. Bulldozers sliced slabs of earth and six drilling rigs bored holes for a drainage system.
Zhang said in an interview at his headquarters that he has all the approvals needed to start work, and he and other executives said that it is common in China to keep working pending further approvals.
If built as planned, the building would be 33 feet taller than the 2,722-foot Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building since 2010. Sky City would cram 39 more floors into its height than the Burj Khalifa, partly because Sky City would be mostly apartments, which do not need the same hollow spaces under the floors as offices require for wiring and cooling, and partly because the ventilation shafts, electrical wiring and even indoor floor tiles will be packed into the modules while they are still at the factory.
The bottom 15 floors would include offices, a school with kindergarten through eighth grade and clinics. A schematic from Broad Group shows a hotel near the top and a restaurant and coffee shop at the apex.
The emphasis on apartments reflects the reviving real estate boom in China — some in China and abroad call it a bubble — as the government has told stateowned banks to lend more in recent months, in response to signs of weaker economic growth.
Zhang exudes confidence that Sky City tower will be built soon, even at the risk of immodesty.
“Things that I envision are definitely going to get done, no doubt,” he said in an interview at his headquarters. “Ordinary people do not know the challenges and issues I face every single day. There are so many issues, 24 hours in a day are not enough for me to deal with all of them.”
People’s Daily was more glum, noting that the Empire State Building, completed in 1931, took about two decades to fill and become a commercial success — and was initially nicknamed the “Empty State Building.”