A Diagrid Body for the Financial City 30 St Mary Axe is a 180-metre office tower in the City of London whose technical intelligence is inseparable from its public image. Better known as the Gherkin, it translated insurance-company headquarters into…
A Terminal That Turned Flight into Structure The TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City is one of the rare modern buildings in which architecture, engineering, corporate identity, and passenger movement become a single…
A Residential Spire for the Gold Coast Q1 Tower in Surfers Paradise is not simply a very tall apartment building. It is a hybrid of residential high-rise, tourist observatory, resort podium, and urban branding device, designed to convert verticality into…
A Building Designed to Disappear by Reflection Maraya in Ashar Valley, AlUla, is one of the strangest recent buildings in the Middle East: a large performance and event venue whose architectural ambition is not to dominate the desert but to…
A Vertical City in a Porcelain Silhouette Lotte World Tower in Seoul is not only the tallest building in South Korea but also the country’s first true supertall, a 123-story mixed-use tower that rises above the Jamsil district at the…
A Tower Reduced to Pure Ratio 432 Park Avenue is a residential supertall in Midtown Manhattan that turns one of architecture’s oldest geometric figures—the square—into an extreme vertical proposition. Rising above Park Avenue with unusual calm, it appears almost abstract…
A City Turned Vertical on the River Marina City in Chicago is not simply a pair of residential towers. It is a mixed-use urban proposition in concrete, assembled on the north bank of the Chicago River as housing, parking, recreation,…
A Cathedral Built as Monument, Reliquary, and Urban Claim Duomo di Siena is not simply the cathedral of Siena. It is the most concentrated architectural statement of the city’s medieval ambitions: a church, a treasury of painting and sculpture, and…
A Tower Built for Wind, Symbol, and Capital Taipei 101 in Taipei is not simply a tall building with a famous skyline profile. It is a highly calculated supertall in which cultural symbolism, structural engineering, seismic resistance, vertical transportation, and…
A Tower Built from Wind, Concrete, and Ambition Burj Khalifa in Dubai is not simply the tallest building on earth. It is a rare case in which architectural image, structural invention, urban branding, and real-estate strategy were pushed to their…
