The Chinese government on Wednesday he said which will impose new limits on the height of skyscrapers, buildings that he considers an “expression of vanity”. The ban is part of a piano larger than the government led by President Xi Jinping, with the aim of partially modifying the country’s architecture, making it more uniform and less conspicuous. In 2020 China already had prohibited the construction of skyscrapers higher than 500 meters: now it has revised the limit, bringing it to 250 meters for cities with more than 3 million inhabitants and to 150 in the others.
The new bans are very harsh: anyone who approves projects contrary to the rules will be considered «responsible for life “for their actions. It is not clear what this expression means (whether prison, for example, or economic sanctions): the penalties will be decided case by case.
China is among the countries in the world with skyscrapers taller: the Shanghai tower – the tallest skyscraper in China and the second tallest in the world – is 632 meters high: three times the UniCredit tower in Milan, the tallest skyscraper in Italy. The tower of the Ping An Finance Center a Shenzen is 599 meters high, more than 10 times the tower of Pisa.
A man in front of some skyscrapers, in Beijing (AP Photo / Mark Schiefelbein)
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The plan by which China decided to change its skyscraper policies was first presented in 2016, with a official statement of the Chinese Communist Party.
The statement said there would be a ban on building too tall or too eccentric in shape.
There are a good number of them in China and for some time the country was called the “playground of architects», Since for many years foreign architects experimented with all kinds of constructions, such as shaped buildings spaceship o di teapot. One of the best known is the headquarters of the Chinese state television, designed by the famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, whose shape recalls the interlocking of some pieces of the tetris
The headquarters of the Chinese state television in Beijing, designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas (AP Photo / Mark Schiefelbein)
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The government justified that statement by speaking of both functional and environmental reasons.
In the preceding decades, urbanization had grown dramatically and the population living in cities had nearly tripled. Cities had “exploded,” the government said, and steps needed to be taken to make them safer and more sustainable. A series of problems related to the uncontrolled and unregulated development of urban centers were therefore mentioned: pollution, traffic, too high costs in the distribution of electricity due to poor and poor urban planning.
According to the government, all these problems could be solved by forbidding the construction of “too tall” or “bizarre-shaped” buildings, promoting instead a functional, aesthetically pleasing, environmentally friendly architecture, made with construction techniques capable of generating less waste and use fewer resources. Above all, prefabricated buildings, much more uniform and less conspicuous, would have been encouraged, which according to the government’s plans within about five years would have constituted about 30 percent of the new Chinese urban architecture. For those who violated the rules, “severe punishment” was envisaged.
The new rules on the measures of skyscrapers followed this declaration and are a further reinforcement of the restrictions imposed previously.
China’s best known and most eye-catching skyscrapers were built between the 1990s and the 2000s, in the full capitalist development of the country, and were designed mostly by US architects.
The Shanghai tower, for example, was designed by Gensler, a San Francisco company, one of the most important in the world in the field of planning and design of workplaces in the world. Similarly, the tower of the Ping An Finance Center was designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, a leading US architectural firm founded in New York in the 1970s, which designed many other Chinese skyscrapers. Shenzen, the city where the Ping An Finance Center tower is located, it is the fourth most populous city in China with over 12 million inhabitants and one of the strongest economically and technologically, to the point of being known as the “Silicon Valley of China”.
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