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The first time I went to New York City, I was 15 years old. I spent the entire trip like a typical tourist, gawking at the skyline and snapping photos of the architecture that I would have to develop before I could show them to anybody. I got my first digital camera later that year before a three-month exchange to France. I hadn’t learned about Haussmann yet, but I spent three trips to Paris admiring his handiwork through the digital display of my Olympus Camedia. I had the bug, and I wasn't the only one.
According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, there are 445 skyscrapers (200m+) currently under construction around the world. That’s almost twice as many skyscrapers as the 240 that were standing at the turn of the century, not to mention the 761 that have been completed since. As the world grows taller it is also becoming more connected. On my next trip to New York, I’ll be able to post my photos directly to the threads for Two World Trade or 56 Leonard.
And it’s not just New York City. The title of the world’s tallest building has been hopping around the globe for decades. Today it’s held by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, but we’ve been watching the 1000-metre Kingdom Tower rise with growing excitement. My hometown of Hamilton is also getting in on the action, with new bike lanes, bike-sharing, and the ambitious urban revitalization schemes that inspired me to study architecture in the first place.
At SkyriseCities, you can connect to the world’s highrise development community. On our front page, we’ll be covering the latest skyscraper design proposals and keeping you informed as these projects rise. We’ll bring you the latest construction updates from our community of global urban photographers and help you join the discussion with our architecture explainers and trivia.
You can get lost in the Database while hunting for your favourite project from Bjarke Ingels Group. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be thrilled to see that they have a project under construction in Calgary and another proposed for Vancouver. You might wonder what brings them to Miami, since you thought American construction was still slow outside of New York and Chicago. You’ll find out that you’re wrong, that Miami is bursting with skyscrapers and is quickly becoming a showroom for Arquitectonica.
Explore the map to see what’s been proposed around the corner or around the world. Whether you’re panning across Europe or zooming in on the Emirates, our map lets you visualize the dataBase while sorting projects by status and building use.
Share your photos, questions and opinions in our Forum, where you’ll find a thread for each project in our Database about cities around the world. You’ll find insider information, daily photo updates from global construction sites, and local perspectives on development. Not to mention the colourful details that don’t always make the news. Did you know that the protected stone in front of the Kelly Ramsey Building is not only a historical marker of the Financial District, it is also the spot where a mother goose makes her nest each year? Neither did I!
Now that you’re here, there are lots of ways to stay connected. After you register with SkyriseCities by clicking the blank avatar in the navigation bar, you can also subscribe to our newsletter in the sidebar, join our Flickr pool, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Youtube.
When I started architecture school in Ann Arbor, a professor gave us all a list of notable nearby projects to visit called “Landmarks Near and Far.” It included the Mies towers in Toronto and Chicago, SANAA’s Glass Pavilion, and the campuses of IIT and Cranbrook Academy of Art. He told us if we visited all the landmarks during our time at school, he would buy us a beer. I mapped out tours of the cities before I visited, and enlisted help from local friends. But my list kept getting longer and I kept getting distracted when I’d fall in love with new designers like Toronto-based Shim-Sutcliffe.
Seeing all of the buildings worth seeing seemed impossible. But now, with SkyriseCities, it is beginning to feel possible again. I hope you’ll join our community as we begin our own list of landmarks near and far. If you can visit each of them, I’ll buy you a beer.
