New urban giants

"The book will present a collection of the most modern skyscrapers in the world, including some of colossal size with increasingly bizarre and extraordinary forms, stunningly different from any kind of architecture that has gone before. This phenomenon can be seen everywhere: single structures emerging from the flat landscape, but also downtowns that redesign natural and artificial waterfronts, central districts or even peripheral and former industrial areas. All these buildings create new symbolic portals of access to cosmopolitan metropolises requiring the imposition of iconic settings in real or media-exaggerated panoramas. The speed and facility with which their presence becomes popular in the collective imagination worldwide makes the battle to produce record-breaking architecture and construction progressively more extreme, moving over time from the West to the East where skyscrapers of gargantuan dimension and astonishing form crystallize, effervesce, liquefy, vaporize, and become fungiform, contorting every rule of construction and theory of traditional architecture. In the western world, however, time-tested city structures are transforming by urban renewal into smaller to medium-sized buildings that seek to evoke surprise in an eccentric image designed with sophisticated elegance."--Jacket.