China’s Big Building Boom: They Like ‘Em Super-Sized

China is out-pacing us in just about every possible Guinness Book of World Record’s competition, especially in architectural superlatives. Hence; THE TALLEST – Work has begun on the Sky City tower, a skyscraper in Changsha, Hunan province, that will be the tallest in the world. The 5.25 billion RMB building will be 202 stories tall with an additional six stories below ground. The total planned floor space is 1.05 million square meters. According to Zhang Xue, the chairman of Broad Group, the top half of the building will consist of apartments, hotels theaters and cinemas, with the bottom half reserved for schools, an elder care center, hospital, and offices. The building will be home to 30,000 people and help take 2,000 cars off the road. There’s also a plan for a vertical farm to help feed residents. THE BIGGEST – This announcement arrives soon after construction was completed on the World’s Largest Building, by volume. Situated in Chengdu, Sichuan province, the New Century Global Center is 500 meters long, 400 meters wide, and 100 meters high. Three times bigger than the Pentagon, its 1.7 million square meters of floor space include shopping centers, offices, hotels, a fake Mediterranean village, and an artificial sun. While the scale of Chinese construction projects continue to set records, the ambition of several projects has far outstripped their usefulness. In anticipation of migration that never came, entire “ghost cities” were built and left vacant in the Kangbashi district of Ordos, Inner Mongolia, and Chenggong, in Kunming, Yunnan province.