Mega cities join in race to construct tallest building

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Long bull markets, you may be disheartened to learn, tend to collapse just as a new contender for the world's tallest building is nearing completion. It's called Rathke's Law of Very Tall Buildings, and it's based on the fact that it takes huge confidence in the economic future to start work on a building that needs tens of thousands of tenants and won't be finished for several years.

That sort of hubris only builds up after long years of economic boom. On any planet where the business cycle has not been abolished, that will also be a time near the end of the boom -- and Rathke's Law, named after U.S. analyst Christopher Rathke, certainly gives a good match for three of the four long U.S. bull markets of the past century.

The first, by his calculations, was in 1895-1906, and its collapse was marked by the building of the Singer Tower in 1906. The second, in the Roaring Twenties, saw a start made on both the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building in New York City before the market crashed in 1929, ushering in the Great Depression.

The third great boom was in 1949-1966, and its end was marked (a bit tardily, it must be admitted) by the completion of the World Trade Center in New York in 1973.

Now that the markets have gone global, so has Rathke's Law. The world's tallest building at the moment is the 1,483 feet (452 meters) Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, a kitsch condiment set that was completed just after the start of the Asian financial meltdown in August, 1997. But that was just a little local difficulty in Asia.

The fourth and last great American boom of the 20th century rolled right on past it, and despite the market turbulence of recent months has still not definitively broken.

However, the bad news is that the queue of new contenders for the title of world's tallest building now stretches all the way around the world.

Sao Paulo, Brazil's biggest city, breaks ground this year on a 495-meter monster that will be four building in one, coming together at the top to leave a hollow center. It will house four hotels, a convention center, and a university, and its 103 floors will have apartments and offices for 50,000 people.

Shanghai's World Financial Center would already have eclipsed the Sao Paulo tower if its completion had not been delayed by the regional economic crisis in Asia. Hong Kong's projected 574-meter Landmark Tower is also stalled for the moment, awaiting a recovery in the local real estate market.

This means that Taiwan, to the chagrin of the Chinese Communist government, may carry off the prize (at least so far as the Chinese-speaking world is concerned) with its 508-meter Taipei Financial Center. The Taipei building would also slightly overtop the Sao Paulo tower -- but it would be easily overshadowed by the 560-meter Grollo Tower in Melbourne, which was given the go-ahead 18 months ago.

The Grollo Tower is an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking, since Melbourne is a city of under four million people with no other buildings even a quarter as tall. But it will hold the title only briefly, if at all.

The leading conventional contender in the new race for the sky is Chicago. Having lost the crown it held since 1974 when the Petronas Towers overtopped the Sears tower three years ago, Chicago aims to reclaim it with 7 South Dearborn, a splendidly slender building 610 meters tall.

It will, in other words, be more than half again as high as the most commonly used benchmark in these matters, New York City's Empire State Building.

Seven South Dearborn may therefore end up as the new benchmark in matters recessionary -- but what are we really talking about here? Everybody, with the possible exception of levitating Indian fakirs, knows that bull markets must come down eventually.

The only real questions are when it will happen, and whether it will be a "soft landing" (some casualties, but not too many people hurt), or a crash landing like 1929.

The truth is that nobody knows when, and while most people are still hoping for a "soft landing" -- well, they would, wouldn't they? Speaking of levitating Indian fakirs, however, some solace can be had from the fact that the World's Really Tallest Building is being built by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, once guru to the 1960s jet-set from Mia Farrow to the Beatles, who truly does believe in "yogic flying".

His Maharishi Global Development Fund is active in property development worldwide (it underwrote the US$3 billion Sao Paulo tower), but its real bid for phallic preeminence is the Center of India Tower. It has been designed by the same firm that was responsible for Manhattan's World Trade Center, but it will not be just another steel-and-glass tower.

The Center of India Tower is going up in the village of Karonda in the state of Madhya Pradesh, and will look like a huge modern version of the temples at nearby Khajuraho. At 677 meters it will leave all the other contenders in the shade -- and since its intended tenants are 100,000 pundits (Hindu sages), it may even avoid the curse that has attended tall buildings ever since the Tower of Babel.