Editorial

摘要

The Burj Tower in Dubai is now the tallest building in the world at over 800 m. In the last ten years the great skyscraper craze of the 1920s and 1930s in New York has been repeated worldwide with this new tower some 60% greater in height than its immediate predecessor Taipei 101 finished in 2004. It is hard to know how long this seemingly inexorable increase in height can continue, but every year for the last ten years, a building greater than 400 m tall has been built. The average height of the world's top 200 buildings is now 275 m and a simple trend projection suggests that this average will rise to 500 m by 2050, and 800 m, the size of the Burj Tower, by 2200. By that time it is entirely likely that Frank Lloyd Wright's vision for a mile-high building will have been realised, although there is a significant probability that it will happen this century.