With the completion of the Columbia Center in 1985 came two basic responses: One was best expressed by the man behind the Space Needle, Victor Steinbrueck, who called the then-tallest building west of the Mississippi a "flat-out symbol of greed and egoism" and "the most obscene erection of ego edifice on the Pacific Coast." The other response was best expressed by the Columbia Center's developer, Martin Selig, who claimed that the arrival of the tower marked nothing less than the arrival of Seattle. "The Space Needle told people where Seattle was," he said in 1987. "Columbia Center tells people Seattle has arrived." Two years after that comment, Columbia Center was dethroned by the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles. Since then, Seattle has not participated in the race to have within its limits the tallest building in this or any part of world.
In fact, with the exception of New York and Chicago, all cities in the U.S. have pretty much checked out of that race. (The focus for U.S. and European cities has shifted from tall buildings to icon architecture—Seattle Central Library, Guggenheim Bilbao, St. Mary Axe, and so on.) If you want to see the tallest skyscrapers in the world then you have to go all the way to the Middle and Far East. There, the race to build the tallest building in the world has reached a condition of frenzy.
At the end of the 20th century, the tallest building in the world was located in the capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. The completion of the Columbia Center might have marked the arrival of a late American city, Seattle; the completion of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur certainly marked the arrival not only of Kuala Lumpur but of the new economic powers of Far East Asia. The shimmering Twin Towers signaled nothing less than a global reorganization of economic wealth, which since the decline of the Arab world at the end of the 15th century had been concentrated in the West. Granted, Japan's economy was second only to the U.S.'s in the First World order, but its wealth was always connected with the West. Petronas Twin Towers were the product, the dream, the force of the Asian economic will.
In 2003, Petronas Twin Towers were displaced by a tower in a city recognized as one of the five Asian Tigers, Taipei. Rising a staggering 1,671 feet into the sky, Taipei 101 dominates the skyline of Taiwan's capital. It makes a dwarf of everything, living and otherwise, around it. But time on Taipei 101's mighty claim is running out fast. Its height will be surpassed by two towers that are under construction: one in the megalopolis of Shanghai (Shanghai World Financial Center); the other in the desert oasis of Dubai (Burj Dubai).
No one knows which of the two will be the tallest when they are completed in 2008. The developers in Dubai and Shanghai are keeping secret the length they will go to claim the vainest of all urban prizes. But as the Shanghai World Financial Center will be a giant among other giants in its skyline (Jin Mao Tower, King Tower, Shimao International Plaza), the Burj Dubai (in a city with a metropolitan-area population of 1.5 million—less than half of Seattle's) will do what Taipei 101 does to its skyline. The city of Dubai will be nothing but a tall building.
