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Japanese developer building China's tallest office tower(Kyodo News International (Tokyo) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Jan. 1--SHANGHAI -- Akio Yoshimura keeps a pair of binoculars in his office on the seventh floor of the HSBC Tower in Shanghai so he can look out the window at a cement hull that is growing steadily taller after a shaky startup. The binoculars will come in particularly handy in early 2008, when Yoshimura's new building, the Shanghai World Financial Center, tops out at 101 stories and 492 meters, becoming the tallest tower in China. "For our company, for Shanghai, it's a dream," Yoshimura said. Yoshimura, president of the 40-year-old Tokyo-based developer Mori Building Ltd., is watching the construction of his company's third property in China, after the tower where he sits with his staff of 80 people and the Senmao Building in Dalian. The $105 billion yen project, designed by American architect Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates and built by two Chinese contractors, has no special Japanese characteristics or Japanese ingenuity, Yoshimura said. He expects tenants from anywhere in the world. Shanghai World Financial Center is taking shape on 30,000 square meters surrounded largely by other new high-rises. It starts underground with five floors of shopping, proceeds upward to a conference room layer and sprouts into 70 stories of office space. Hotel rooms dominate floors 79-93, and the top layer is an observatory that will be open to the public for an undisclosed fee. Dream is still an operative word. The project depends on future growth of its downtown location, the Pudong New District, which is a 15-year-old boom area for new office complexes but faces occupancy competition from other parts of skyscraper-littered Shanghai and other Chinese cities. "In planning, we've done a lot of surveying and gone through a lot of tough spots," Yoshimura said in early December. "We think of it this way. We have a building in a key area. As the area develops, the building's value goes up." Today's construction also follows eight years of cost and structural issues. Construction began for the first time in 1997 but stopped in 1998 because of the Asian financial crisis. The original Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates design, a circular breezeway on the top floors of the rectangular tower, was scrapped for its lack of utility, construction difficulty and cost relative to the current design, which replaces the circle with a trapezoid. Yoshimura rejects widespread rumors Mori Building abandoned the design under pressure because the circular breezeway resembled a Japanese Hinomaru flag. "There are people who like to make all kinds of jokes," he said. Local people say they will add no resistance to the project, despite widespread discontent toward Japan because of political and historical disagreements. "It's beautiful," a clothing store clerk said when she saw a picture of the building. "I have no hard feelings about it at all." Shanghai tea seller Lin Chen said that because of Sino-Japanese political problems she would rather not give the title of China's tallest building to a Japanese company and wondered why Shanghai permitted Mori Building the accolade. But she can accept the project as long as it benefits China economically. "China shouldn't think about other things until its economy has developed," she said. A Shanghai retiree said Shanghai World Financial Center would blend in with the rest of the city. "High rises are everywhere," he said. "I can't even remember their names." Mori Building has already earned a name in Shanghai. Active in Tokyo since the city's building boom before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, it built the HSBC Building in 1998 under the name Senmao Shanghai International Building. That 203 meter-high tower filled up with foreign companies because it was one of the earliest fully developed office complexes in Shanghai, Yoshimura said. In 1996, it built the 108 meter-high Senmao Building in the core of the Japanese business district in the northeastern Chinese coastal city Dalian. Mori recently finished the 238 meter-high Roppongi Hills Mori Tower in Tokyo and has projects in the United States and Vietnam, as well. Mori's Shanghai World Financial Center dream has also caught the attention of other Japanese developers, at least five of which operate in Shanghai and some of which worry that southern China's energy shortage could drive up the cost of such a project, said Masaki Yabuuchi, chief of the local Japan External Trade Organization office. "In Japan, everyone knows about it, but how they see it I've never heard," Yabuuchi said. |