[NYguy]

http://shanghai.urbanatomy.com/index...master-builder

The Master Builder



09 December 2010
Written by JFK Miller

When completed in 2014, Shanghai Tower in Pudong will be China’s tallest building and the second-tallest building in the world after the Burj Dubai. The super-building will dwarf its two neighbors – the Jinmao Tower and SWFC – as it will the Taipei 101, currently the tallest structure in the Far East.

The building will define Shanghai just as the Empire State Building did for New York in its time. The finished tower will complete a government master plan that goes back 20 years to have a set of three super-buildings in the city’s finance and trade zone. It is unlikely that we will see taller than this in Shanghai in our lifetime, at least not in Lujiazui.

The man who designed it, Marshall Strabala, is a rare breed of architect. The 49-year-old American occupies a modern pantheon comprising the likes of Renzo Piano and Lord Norman Foster – architects whose iconic buildings are redefining the world’s cityscapes of the 21st century. If you narrow the field to those architects who have designed super high-rises – over 70 stories or more – then you’re talking about only a handful of people. Between them, Strabala, his former SOM colleague and mentor Adrian Smith and Argentine-American César Pelli have designed the top 10 tallest buildings in the world which have either been constructed or are presently under construction.

Strabala himself has worked on three of them: Shanghai Tower, the Burj Dubai – which at 828 meters is the tallest man-made structure ever built – and the Greenland Square Zifeng Tower in Nanjing, the world’s seventh-tallest building, completed in May this year. On the Burj and Zifeng Tower, Strabala was studio head working under the supervision of Smith, who is credited as the designer of both projects.

“Super high-rise buildings are so special that there are really only a few people who have done them,” says Strabala. “Every architect in the world thinks they can do super tall buildings. The idea of them is easy to come up with. The execution is what separates the men from the boys. I remember Stan Korista at SOM [where Strabala worked for 19 years] saying, ‘You can’t do one of these buildings until you’ve already done one of them because they are so different, so challenging.’ Most architects know everything about a five- or a 10-story building. A 40-story building is marginally different. But once you start getting above 70 stories everything starts to change radically. It is sort of like a doctor who does brain surgery and a doctor who does heart surgery. They’re both doctors, but you really don’t want the heart surgeon working on someone’s brain. You want someone who’s been in there a dozen times working on that grey matter. Even though the heart surgeon understands everything about surgery he’s just not done surgery of the cranium. Architecture is the same sort of thing.”

Strabala was brought into the project in 2006 by Gensler, who appointed him Director of Design after poaching him from SOM before the Shanghai Tower bidding process began. The bid was one of the most coveted in world architecture – all of the 10 or so major international firms were invited to compete as were the top local firms, with the final selection coming down to a choice between SOM, Foster and Gensler, a firm with an excellent reputation for interior design, but not well known for its architecture.

Gensler capitalized on Strabala’s portfolio with the Burj Dubai and the Nanjing Zifeng Tower, for which he had just completed the construction documents, to win the bid and lead the project. Tongji University was selected as Gensler’s local partner and architect of record. As the third and most significant building of the Lujiazui troika, Shanghai Tower would have to complement the two existing buildings.

“We always called it ‘the three brothers’; it was always a composition of three, and we never showed the expert judging panel our building alone, we always showed it in the group. You had the building of the past, the building of the present, the building of the future. The Jin Mao is China of the past, the famous steel pagoda, it references history. The SWFC is the building of the present, that is, the China that accepts foreign investment. Shanghai Tower is a building of the future, a very dynamic form.”

That dynamic form comprises two key components: a glass ‘double skin’ and a vertical twist of 120 degrees.

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