Going Up ... and Up: When Height Is All That Matters

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Not in Asia, however. Many Asian clients saw the plain glass-and-steel Modernist box as a Western import, remote from their national traditions. They wanted silhouettes that would recollect local styles. So the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, until recently the tallest buildings in the world, evoke the minarets of a mosque expanded to sky-high proportions. The Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, by Skidmore Owings & Merrill, is a highly elongated pagoda. So is Taipei 101, a giant knickknack of a building that pushes the Postmodern idea to the edge of kitsch. Make that past the edge.

But more agreeable gestures are out there. Cesar Pelli, who designed the Petronas Towers, is also the architect behind Two International Finance Center in Hong Kong, a 1,362-ft. office tower executed in the Art Deco-- flavored projectile form he has developed lately. And when it's completed, the Shanghai World Financial Center, by the American firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, will be one of the most elegant buildings in the world, a chisel-shaped tower with a giant oculus cut into its tapering top. It could prove that architecture, and not just construction, is headed to new heights.