At the 1929 Beaux Arts Ball, William van Allen, the designer of the Chrysler Building, masqueraded as his landmark skyscraper, which was then being built. Van Allen’s elaborate costume, complete with his signature spire headdress, underscores the theatrical dimension of the skyscraper and the role it has played in the theater of the urban skyline. The Chrysler building and the Empire State building were some of the first protagonists in the unfolding drama of the city. These early skyscrapers dressed structural steel frames in elaborate cladding, transforming the mundane into the spectacular. These five skyscrapers we are about to see are very good examples of how the mundane was turned into the spectacular.

DG Bank (Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Frankfurt, 1993)

The 658 foot (201 meter) DG Bank Headquarters is one of the first American-style skyscrapers to be built in a European city, where building regulations had traditionally limited building heights. The design of the DG Bank allows this American import to integrate itself into the city fabric by breaking the tower into a composition of discrete parts.

Composed of distinct masses, the design introduces a new “tower of three parts.” Each of its parts-podium, shaft, and crown-is molded by external site forces and internal programmatic needs. In this case, the design brief called for a mix of uses, including office space, residential apartments, and a central winter garden. The design of the tower includes a slender shaft with a low rise podium that wraps around the winter garden. The low rise structure embraces the winter garden and defines the perimeter of the block. The tower takes on a figural quality in the shaft, and creates a signature profile against the sky, where a radial, cantilevered crown gestures towards the old center of Frankfurt.

This marriage of curvilinear and rectilinear volumes places the tower in dialogue with its external context, while its internal spatial requirement for natural light informs the tower’s slender proportions. The materials used to clad the tower reinforce each separate element. The shaft of the tower is made up of a curved volume, clad in white metal and glass, while the orthogonal volume is clad in stone, with punched openings. The central volume, an exterior expression of the service core, is clad in stone and acts as an organizing spine. The low-rise perimeter blocks are clad primarily in stone with punched-out windows to help ground the tower.

Stylistically, the DG Bank tower is a pivotal building, marking the climax of a collagist design strategy of assembly of discrete building parts, and signaling a shift away from classically inspired postmodernism, towards a language that could be called “theatrical modernism.” The design of the tower harkens to a romantic age of skyscraper design, when each building was a theatrical actor in an elaborate urban masquerade. The DG Bank tower’s architectural articulations and formal gestures place the building in dialogue with its audience-the city.

Plaza 66 (Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Shanghai, 2001)

Located along Nanjing Xi Lu, Shanghai’s historical commercial street, the new mixed use development draws on the vibrant street life to inform the vocabulary of building elements. Its voluptuous composition of curvilinear forms makes it approach the baroque.

The development is comprised of two office towers and a five story retail podium that houses a luxury shopping mall. The design is based on a language of concave and convex geometry that shapes each of the major elements. The mall is organized around a curved retail gallery, which connects an almond-shaped atrium to an inverted-cone-shaped volume. The towers are arranged radially around an implied center, and share a curved mid height bridge. Each volume is articulated as distinct and recognizable, composed sculpturally as a three dimensional collage. The architects describe the dynamic composition as an “Embrace of swirling forms…influenced by the forces of a vortex.”

Each element in the composition is clad in a distinct curtain-wall fabric. The retail podium is clad in stone, while the shafts of the two towers are clad in a vertically articulated glass curtain wall. The upward spiral of the composition is terminated by a translucent glass lantern. The need to surmount a tower with a dramatic crown, spire, or headpiece is typical of theatrical Asian skyscrapers, and is a reference to early Art Deco skyscrapers like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.

The project is typical of a crop of buildings that sprang up in Shanghai in the late 1990;s. Fueled by optimism, foreign investment, and departure from traditionally strict speculative office space criteria, these projects embraced a formal exuberance unseen anywhere else in the world. The cumulative effect of these developments have transformed the city, and reestablished an image of Shanghai as the cultural and business center of a new China.

Burj Al Arab (W.S Atkins, Dubai, 1999)

The Burj Al Arab luxury hotel in Dubai creates a vertical fantasy world in the image of the skyscraper. The tower’s billowing form and lavish interiors create the setting for an elaborate resort experience.

Built on a man-made island, the hotel is accessed by helicopter or via a private causeway served by the hotel’s fleet of Rolls Royces. The skyscraper is the apt vessel for a resort experience predicated on exclusivity.

The tower, inspired by the billowing curves of a sailboat, gesture out to the sea with a prow-shaped tower and a sail-like atrium. The two sides of the triangular plan enclose a full height atrium, which is enclosed in a taut fiberglass membrane. The articulation of the structure, complete with trusses and masts, reinforces the nautical metaphors and gives the tower a distinct futuristic appearance.

All the rooms are duplexes with twenty-three-foot floor to ceiling heights, for a maximum of spatial and material luxury. A rich palate of materials, inspired by local materials and Arabian literature, is used on the interiors. Fabrics, metalwork, and ornament contribute to the voluptuous interiors.

Appearing like a mirage on the horizon, the Burj Al Arab hotel is the epitome of extravagance and luxury. It is an extreme building combining opulence in form and color with a theatrical structural expressiveness. It is the paradigm of architecture as a stage set for an elaborate fantasy world.

International Finance Center 2 (Cesar Belli & Associates, Hong Kong, 2004)

This latest addition to the Hong Kong skyline towers above its neighbors, creating a new landmark in a city already saturated with skyscrapers. Together with the Kowloon Station Tower across the water, the two projects will mark the north and south banks of the harbor forming the “harbor gateway.”

Part of an ambitious harbor front development, the IFC complex is built over Hong Kong Station, the terminus of the airport express train connecting Hong Kong to its new airport. The complex will contain an 88-story office tower, a 32-story office tower, a Four Seasons Hotel, a retail podium, and links to a new ferry terminal. The complex links with the new Central-Wanchai reclamation, intended to create a new pedestrian promenade on Hong Kong Island’s harbor front.

Built on a reclaimed land, the new tower extends the central business district, known as Central, to the north. The heart of the city’s banking and financial district, Central is also the retail epicenter of Hong Kong. IFC will connect to the existing retail network made up of an intricate web of shopping malls and pedestrian bridges, tying multiple buildings together within a single retail atmosphere.

The International Finance Center tower draws its inspiration from the Art Deco American skyscrapers. It evokes the setback style of towers in New York and Chicago, and recalls Eliel Saarinen’s second place entry to the Chicago Herald Tribune competition. Both designs feature a tapering tower with chiseled corners and an articulated top. A decorative feature composed of multiple vertical blades, crowns the building and extends the tapered gesture of the tower.

Unlike the early Art Deco buildings, which were clad in stone, this tower is clad in reflective silver glass. The curtain wall is articulated as a vertical shaft, with curtain wall members expressed as vertical piers. Intermittent horizontal members weave between the piers and add a fabric like texture to the skin.

Pelli’s design for the IFC creates a dramatic new addition to the Hong Kong skyline by referencing the early skyscraper designs of the Art Deco Period. The nostalgic references to early American skyscrapers illustrate Pelli’s assertion that a tower is a “true skyscraper” only if it has a “centric form that tapers with well-proportioned setbacks, expressing a vertical movement towards the sky.” Everything else is just high-rise.

Shun Hing Square (K.Y Cheung Design Associates, Shenzhen, 1996)

On the border between Hong Kong and the southern Chinese province of Guangdong is Shenzhen, a city that twenty years ago had a population of 30,000 but has swelled to between four and six million inhabitants today. It is referred to as an “instant city” in the constellation of cities in the Pearl River Delta. Standing at the crossroads of a major intersection in Shenzhen is Shun-Hing Square.

At sixty-nine stories tall, 1263 feet (385 meters), Shun Hing Plaza is the eleventh-tallest building in the world. Approaching the Guangdong border by train from Hong Kong, the viewer is surrounded by fields of green, which are in stark contrast to the urban density of Hong Kong. Then suddenly, as the train rounds a bend, Shun Hing Square rises like a needle from the fields in the foreground. As one gets closer, the full impact of Shenzhen is felt. The city rises like a dense urban forest pushing up against the Shenzhen River, which marks the border with New Territories.

The building’s architect, K.Y. Cheung, states that the tower was designed and constructed in record time: two months for design and forth months for construction. The accelerated schedule is typical of the instant urbanism of southern China. The mixed use development is made up of a shopping mall, an apartment block, and an office tower with an observation deck at the top. Cheung sought to articulate each element differently, choosing distinct materials for each part. The tower is clad in a green reflective glass: the residential bar is clad in white tiles with a rotated element clad in red: and the retail mall is clad in granite, over layed with a rotated-grid pattern.

The tower footprint consists of a glass lozenge shape intersected with a stone-clad rectangular volume. The curved corners make it sleek and futuristic, while the rectilinear areas are efficient and easily leased. The tower is remarkable for its slender proportions, with a width to height ration of 1:9, pushing the limits of structural engineering. The cylinders are expressed as spires at the top with a tilted volume appearing like a keystone cap.

The image of a skyscraper in a field resonates in the Pearl River Delta, where cities have emerged seemingly overnight as foreign investment capital pours across the border, extending the manufacturing base from Hong Kong to the entire Pearl River Delta region. The economic and cultural forces acting on the built environment in Shenzhen have created an instant urbanism. The forests of towers, many of them without tenants, are a Potemkin Metropolis of China’s aspirations of Western modernity.