The Core

Wow. Mesermizing.

When we went to China in... 2002??... we had a hotel room right across from a construction project that looked like this - about a dozen high-rise buildings going up at once, with one of them half inhabited and the furthest behind being a skeleton structure. I think they were all 16 stories. I sort of wondered about the wisdom of building them all at once instead of getting one up and rented/sold, but didn't think much further than that. It never occurred to me that the project would stall and a decade later, they would all be destroyed.

Such a waste of resources. That's a lot of concrete and steel.

>now leaning dangerously

Yeah, *somebody* is going to get some serious overtime or haz duty pay for going in that one.  ....And the somebody who screwed up is going to a 'retraining' camp.

When we were in downtown Hanoi at that restaurant in the hi-rise, I noticed one or two unfinished office towers nearby.  From the weeds and vines on them, they looked to have been abandoned for a while.

related?

Chinese real estate developers have more than $5 trillion of debt. China resembles Japan of early 1990s.

China’s ‘Volcker Moment’ is a mounting risk to global recovery
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/09/01/chinas-volcker-moment-mounting-risk-global-recovery/

This thread and this article make me wonder what happens when you have to take down a 100-story skyscraper in Manhattan. It will happen eventually, hopefully next time without crashing jet aircraft into them.

Why the Empire State Building, and New York, May Never Be the Same
It once symbolized an urban way of working, and the city’s resilience. In the pandemic’s second year, the future of the world’s most famous skyscraper is in doubt.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/15/nyregion/empire-state-building-reopening-new-york.html

In all, a vast majority of tenants who shared their plans are remaining in the building, and only a small share have decided to give up their office space. But whether a company had the option to leave was generally determined by its lease agreement.

In Manhattan, 19 percent of office space is available for rent, according to Newmark, a real estate services company. That is roughly double the average rate of the last decade.

Of course the Japanese would have figured out how to demolish things without noise or mess. Who else other than the Swiss?