17 October 2016

Garden City, Megacity: Rethinking Cities for the Age of Global Warming

Mun Summ Wong, Richard Hassell & Alina Yeo, WOHA Architects

This paper proposes an alternative to the continuing implementation of unsustainable 20th century urban planning models. By using WOHA’s mini-city projects and proposals as prototypes...

17 October 2016

Humanizing the Giants

Swinal Samant, National University of Singapore

The rise in sustainable skyscrapers and large-scale mixed-use buildings has seen the proliferation of atria and sky-courts worldwide due to their ability to simultaneously contribute...

17 October 2016

Replacing Corridors with Sky-Courts to Create Affordable and Socially Desirable High-Rise Housing

Mazlin Ghazali, Arkitek M Ghazali; Tareef Hayat Khan, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

Studies over the last 60 years have consistently concluded that high-rise housing is less suitable for most people compared to low-rise, especially for children. To...

17 October 2016

The Space Between: Urban Spaces Surrounding Tall Buildings

James Parakh, City of Toronto Planning Division

This paper is intended to introduce the upcoming CTBUH technical guide titled “The Space Between,” which investigates the importance of publicly accessible spaces surrounding tall...

28 April 2016

3for2: Realizing Spatial, Material, and Energy Savings through Integrated Design

Arno Schlueter & Adam Rysanek, ETH Zürich; Forrest Meggers, Princeton University; et al.

As the world adapts to dual trends of climate change and urbanization, tall office buildings in hot and humid climate zones near the equator are...

04 February 2016

Humanizing the Megascale

Jaron Lubin, Safdie Architects

The principles set forth 48 years ago at the Montreal Expo 1967, embodied in the form of Habitat ’67, which proposed an entirely different kind...

04 February 2016

The Other Side of Tall Buildings: The Urban Habitat

Daniel Safarik, CTBUH

A growing number of tall buildings recognized by the CTBUH, through its international awards programs and research, are noteworthy not so much because of their...

28 January 2016

Debating Tall: Modular as Homogenizing Force?

Shonn Mills, Ramboll; Philip Oldfield, University of New South Wales

The persistent interest in prefabricated modular construction has now turned into high-rise reality, though the results have been inconsistent. Earlier experiments with the approach resulted...

26 October 2015

Apartments in Skyscrapers: Innovations and Perspectives of their Typology Development

Elena Generalova & Viktor Generalov, Samara State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering

The paper proposes to reflect on the questions: what does the typology of apartments in contemporary high-rise construction mean and whether it is consistent with...

26 October 2015

Breaking The Pre-fabricated Ceiling: Challenging the Limits for Modular High-Rise

Shonn Mills & Dave Grove, Ramboll Group; Matthew Egan, Modularize

Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMa) technologies including Prefabricated Prefinished Volumetric Construction (PPVC) have become a viable and sometimes preferred approach in select building sectors....

26 October 2015

Dense Urbanism: The High-Rise Tower as a Building Block for the Public Realm

Moshe Safdie & Jaron Lubin, Safdie Architects

Though the skyscraper has been with us for a century, we are yet to discover how to deploy it as an effective building block for...

26 October 2015

How New Generations, Industries and Workplace Paradigms Are Redefining the Commercial High-Rise

Timothy Johnson, NBBJ

This paper will provide a data-driven analysis of building performance from three eras: the early 1900s, mid-twentieth century, and today. This longitudinal analysis will illustrate...

26 October 2015

The Network of Urban Spaces Surrounding Tall Buildings

James Parakh, City of Toronto Planning Department

This paper investigates the Network of Urban Spaces Surrounding Tall Buildings, the Tall Building as Place Makers how Tall Buildings meet the street. As contributing...

28 July 2015

Debating Tall: Has Tall Social Housing Been a Failure?

Shi-Ming Yu, National University of Singapore; Reinier de Graaf, Office for Metropolitan Architecture

The world’s rapid urbanization and densification of its cities will need to include its legions of economically disadvantaged people. Yet in many countries, the “obvious”...

31 December 2014

Year in Review: Tall Trends of 2014

Daniel Safarik, Antony Wood, Marty Carver & Marshall Gerometta, CTBUH

An All-Time Record 97 Buildings of 200 Meters or Higher Completed in 2014 and 2014 showed further shifts towards Asia, and also surprising developments in...

06 November 2014

Designing High-Rise Housing: The Singapore Experience

Elena Generalova & Viktor Generalov, Samara State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering

There is a land shortage in Singapore, compelling the search for different models of high-rise housing. Singapore’s experience breaks with the dual stereotypes that high-rise...

06 November 2014

From Block to Blob and Back Again

Ben van Berkel, UNStudio

United Network Studio (UN Studio) is a Dutch architecture firm founded in 1988 by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, which in the 2000s established...

16 September 2014

Green Walls in High-Rise Buildings

CTBUH Research

The latest CTBUH technical guide, Green Walls in High-Rise Buildings, provides a thorough investigation of the methods used around the world for implementation of vertical...

16 September 2014

Space Formations

Ole Scheeren, Büro Ole Scheeren

As architecture keeps expanding vertically – with ever taller buildings to emerge across the world, and with the skyscraper having long become the predominant typology...

16 September 2014

The Tropical Skyscraper: Social Sustainability in High Urban Density

Mun Summ Wong, Richard Hassell & Alina Yeo, WOHA Architects

Asia’s rapidly growing metropolises demand an alternative strategy for city planning and architecture that addresses the need to live appropriately and sustainably with our tropical...

16 September 2014

Vertical Public Realms: Creating Urban Spaces in the Sky

Dr. Yuri Hadi, Leicester School of Architecture; Professor Tim Heath & Dr. Philip Oldfield, University of Nottingham

The resurgence of the ‘Streets in the Sky’ concept is driving the recent transformation of social and public spaces in vertical cities, with Asia leading...

14 September 2014

Towards Sustainable Vertical Urbanism

Daniel Safarik, CTBUH

The survival of humanity on this planet relies on a radical repositioning of our cities. In the face of unprecedented global population growth, urbanization, pollution...

21 September 2012

For Everyone a Sky Garden

Jaron Lubin, Safdie Architects

A key principle of Moshe Safdie’s work over the last four decades has been to develop livable collective spaces within dense urban environments. This paper...

19 September 2012

Capital Cost Drivers in Tall Buildings

Hsui-Min Eugene Seah, Langdon & Seah Singapore Pte Ltd

In land-scarce nations, one of the solutions for land use intensification is to go upwards and downwards in construction. However, how does this affect sustainability...

19 September 2012

Singapore: A High-Rise Utopia?

Peng Beng Khoo & Belinda Huang, Arc Studio Architecture + Urbanism

Singapore has already implemented many urban-scale sustainable strategies that other cities only dream of – true integrated transport networks, 60-storey high green walls, subsidized government-built...

01 February 2012

Greening the Urban Habitat: Singapore

Jason Pomeroy, Broadway Malyan

The continued depletion of open spaces as a result of urbanization has also seen a subsequent reduction in greenery and gradual rise in urban temperatures...

10 October 2011

Beyond Skyrise Gardens: The Potential of Urban Roof-Top Farming in Singapore

Wai Wing Tai Donald, Alexandra Health

The younger generation of Singaporeans, particularly those born from the 1980s onwards, might not have the opportunity to visit local farms as most of them...

11 September 2011

The Global Impact of 9/11

Leader Interviews by Jan Klerks, CTBUH

Just as many Americans still remember exactly where they were when they heard the news that US president John F. Kennedy had been shot, most...

13 April 2011

Tall and Urban: An Analysis of Global Population and Tall Buildings

CTBUH Research

Tall buildings are spreading across the globe at an ever-increasing rate. This study demonstrates the relationship between population and tall buildings across those countries and...

22 January 2011

Case Study: Marina Bay Sands, Singapore

Moshe Safdie, Safdie Architects

Marina Bay Sands is a high-density and mixed-use integrated resort complex which was conceived as a city microcosm rooted in Singapore’s culture, climate, and contemporary...

01 August 2009

Tall Buildings in Southeast Asia - A Humanist Approach to Tropical High-Rise

Mun Summ Wong & Richard Hassell, WOHA

High-rise, high-density living has been embraced as a positive accommodation solution for many millions of people living in Asia's growing urban metropolis. This paper outlines...

01 February 2009

The Skycourt - A Comparison of Four Case Studies

Jason Pomeroy, Broadway Malyan

The effects of industrial capitalism and secularism have not only seen the fall of public man (Sennett 1976) but the slow disintegration of the public...

05 March 2008

Ecoskyscrapers and Ecomimesis: New tall building typologies

Ken Yeang, Llewelyn Davies Yeang

Designing the ecoskyscraper involves configuring its built form and operational systems so that they integrate with nature in a benign and seamless way over its...

31 December 2006

Tallest Buildings Completed in 2006

Nina Tower 1 in Hong Kong, at 319 meters high, leads the list of the ten tallest buildings completed in 2006. The Sports City Tower/Aspire...

16 October 2005

Estate Renewal Through Development of Prefabricated Super High-Rise Buildings

Chor Cheong Fong, Housing and Development Board of Singapore

This paper presents Housing & Development Board (HDB) of Singapore’s solution in the development of prefabricated super high-rise residential buildings to solve Singapore’s land scarce...

20 October 2003

To Live High or Low: Case Study of Singapore Public Housing Residents

Belinda Yuen, Steve Appold & Kwee Lanny Kurnianingrum, The National University of Singapore; Anthony Yeh, University of Hong Kong; George Earl, University of Queensland; John Ting, Private Architect

The intent of this paper is to discuss the empirically derived research on Singapore residents’ perceptions of building height and their reactions to supertall living....

11 February 2000

Asian Urban Futures

Chris Abel, University of Sydney

Chris Abel writes on the development of the future Asian megacities and their urban landscapes.