Asian Heights

The rapid growth of the technology advances of the new century construction industry leads to a regular changes in the list of the world’s tallest buildings. The obtained titles of most impressive skyscrapers in respective categories pass from one building to another, while contemporary planet habitants tire of getting surprised by new high-rise achievements. Its obvious that the overwhelming majority of such changes in the cities skylines are being undergone by Asian countries. Mass high-rise construction in China or India is so notable that we regularly cover these processes in our targeted overviews. However, these changes happen also in other countries of Asian region.

The closest attention to high-rise construction of the new century was noticed in the mid-noughties. A great amount of daring and ambitious projects were developed for cities of South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. Meanwhile, more developed cities of these countries were not so keen on enlarging the number of new tall buildings. In some cases the system of high-rise limitations regulated by local legislation, like in Japan or Singapore for instance, restricted firmly the parameters of newly-constructed buildings. In other countries, for example in Malaysia or Taiwan, certain ambitions connected with the worldwide “high-rise race” trend were satisfied even in the 1990s or in the early 2000s thus producing a calm reaction to the idea of competition with neighbors in the dispute aimed at identifying the regional leader in high-rise construction. 

Since high-rise construction as such is an extremely difficult, multi-component and rather long-term process, many tall buildings finished in the early 2010s were designed and approved before the world economic crisis (2007-08). Of course some of the projects changed and got simplified, frozen or even cancelled. Nevertheless, investors in certain cases dared to invest in high-rise construction right after the crisis. As a result, new skyscrapers were gradually erected in South Korea and Vietnam in the 2010s, while in Indonesia and Thailand large-scale high-rise projects are actively built nowadays. We will dwell upon them in detail. 

Text: Marianna Maevskaya