Apul’s post yesterday demonstrated the importance of the phallus in South Asian culture. As if on cue, Delhi officials announced today that they will be going ahead with plans to build the world’s tallest building on the outskirts of their city. From The Guardian Unlimited:
Local officials said the building in Noida would be 710 metres (2,330ft) tall – 202 metres higher than Taiwan’s Taipei 101, the current tallest building on the planet.
The skyscraper, said to have been designed to resemble the peaks of the Himalayas, is scheduled to be open for business by 2013.
It will contain a 50-floor five-star hotel, a 40-storey glass atrium and 370,000 sq metres (4m sq ft) of shopping centres.
“New York in the 30s, Malaysia in the 90s and China today all have used tall buildings to showcase their countries to the world,” said Hafeez Contractor, the architect behind the building.
“We want this building to show to the world what India can do.”
Ummm. How about working on poverty and literacy first. As you can imagine not EVERYONE is happy about this:
…some experts are critical of the new wave of Indian design, which they say simply mimics what others have done before and does not take account of local conditions.
“It’s not suited for Indian conditions. We do not have enough water. We do not have the uninterrupted electricity supply,” said Balkrishna Doshi, one of India’s most respected urban designers.
“The building will need its own power plant to make sure the lifts do not stop when the electricity does.”
Let’s see if plans for the building thrust forward or end up going limp when faced with pressure from the inevitable protests.
More re: infrastructure issues: Noida reportedly only has three fire engines at present:
Will this boondoggle be termed Profli Gate?
These old arguments of ‘poverty and illiteracy’ are tiresome. Socialist era politicians used this ruse to prevent opening up markets and now, it seems, we have new naysayers who don’t see the spin-off benefits of such projects.
I was in Kuala Lumpur last month. Take out Petronas towers and the airport.. nothing much left. Mumbai would eat it any day. But the KL brought image.. and tourists.
So they have the swanky airport to capitalize on the tourist boom and try and edge out Singapore as the transit hub for the south-east asian region.
They got the F1 track at Sepang. And laid awesome highways connecting KL, Airport and Sepang. Eventually, the quality highways extended all the way down the country to Singapore.
Oh.. they also have great night life thanks to the fresh boom.
Spin-off benefits ppl! I bet the naysayers would like India’s space program grounded too.. on the grounds of ‘poverty’ first.
Remember Indira and ‘garibi hatao’? Where did that lead to?
The way to removing poverty is by creating growth and providing opportunities to the poor to elevate their own status. That’s Eco 101 in liberalized India. Unfortunately, some just don’t get it.
correction: “But the KL brought image.. and tourists.” above should read “But the Petronas twin towers brought image.. and tourists.”
Hafeez Contractor is the most godawful architect ever. Living in Bombay, I am pretty alive to it’s obvious architectural shortcomings, but Contractor, is at best, a charlatan. The hideous concrete blocks he’s scattered over much of India are going to be eyesores for many years to come. He’s also not averse to jack-knifing buildings into spaces that would struggle to accomodate a medium-sized Bombay ‘kholi.’
Probably no end to the Contractor madness, but I do feel better after this rant 🙂
Antrix, I was being a bit flip when I said,”How about working on poverty and literacy first,” but I realize that wasn’t obvious. I myself have chastized such logic. That being said your argument doesn’t apply here. Delhi is already a world class city. Adding a really really tall building is not going to increase tourism by more than a fraction if at all. Pretty much everyone that goes for a tour of India is going to end up in Delhi anyways. More than that are the concerns that Manish stated. The infrastructure just isn’t there to support this kind of thing. Also if you think the World Trade Towers in NYC were a juicy terrorist target than just imagine the giant target that will be painted on the side of this thing. Who would even want to work there?
While I myself haven’t been to Delhi, from what I’ve heard, their airport is anything but world class. (That could be said for any other Indian airport, for that matter!)
If the infrastructure isn’t there, then you create it! That’s the spin-off point I am making here!
The bit abt the terrorist target, I hope you are being flip about that!
Anyway, we can keep arguing but without result ‘cos neither of us can influence the powers that be 🙂
something OT here: when you make changes to a post, could you please strike-out the original and append the new stuff? For the sake of journalistic integrity and keeping those who use feedreaders sane?
antrix: to add to what you said. petronas in KL has not been able to completely rent out its officespace. atleast, with delhi I say, we should’nt have any problems i filling it up!
i would’nt be surprised if most americans still think they own the tallest buildings. i am also wondering if someone asked to reform civil rights law while they were building empire state buildings.
No! Why Hafeez?! Whatever happened to real architects? He’s single-handedly responsible for the death of Mumbai’s skyline. Maybe he’s just the man to build a phallus.
Antrix, What was changed in this post?
Ideally, your feedreader should do the doc compare for you.
it’s not from ‘The Guardian Unlimited’; wrong usage. It’s from ‘The Guardian’. The Unlimited is just random, the newspaper’s the Guardian. It is the same site as guardian.co.uk. Just thought I’d point this out, as it’s akin to saying ‘The Times of India Indiatimes’ reports…
Thanks ladka, I was wondering about that when I cited it. I’ll correct it.
or “chai tea latte”??
Abhi,
Not this one.. a general SM thing. Hence the OT remark 😉
Manish, Ideally yes, the feedreader should do it. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be open about the mistakes you make. Slate, Boingboing, everyone else acknowledge changes upfront. It’s just the right thing to do, IMHO.
In the end, your blog – your call!
The write-for-8-hours-then-publish model of Slate, and the write-once, short paragraph format of Boing Boing, are very different from the way I write.
I sometimes tweak a single post 20 times. You don’t want to see all that markup, nor would it even be legible– you want to see the final version. If the error is acknowledged in the comments and fixed in the main post, that’s what counts– not an IRS-like audit trail.
I designed one iteration of Microsoft Word’s revision marking features, so I’m intimately familiar with this area. And an obsessive reviser is the very worst case for markup. At best you’d want to see a diff of the very first draft and the final, if that.
Okay, that kinda makes sense why things are the way they are over here. Of course, I wouldn’t want spelling fixes, et. al. showing up! But things like the Guardian Unlimited thing you did here.. that’s okay, no?
Dubai is planning a tower in the same height range.
Shame, Sepia run of good articles finally comes to and end with this piece of tripe. Why is it that every single fucking thing in India has to go bck to poverty and illiteracy. If it bothers you so much, plese go back there, start a school, and do some teaching. Failing that STFU. Building a tall building means that you will need to find workers to build it – guess what there are people who need jobs in India. Once the building is complete, you will need to staff it. Guess what – people need jobs in India. When you see that the current state of infrastructure can’t support the building you will do one of 2 things – stop making the building – thus causing much embarrasment to yourself, and then attempting to imporve the infrastructure – or, you will simultaneously improve the infratructure to complement this building. This has already been replicated with the Delhi Metro. In order to support the Metro, a lot of other things needed to be added, so they were, including the privatisation and stabilisation of Delhi’s Electricty Supply. What is the point of teaching everybody to read and write, and to make sure they have enough money if they don’t have a goal after that? Once upon a time, mobile phones were only for rich people. But they are more of a necessity in India than elsewhere, and our mobile system beats the crap out of America’s any frikkin’ day of the week. As for the poverty and illiteracy, it has been decreasing steadily every year for the past 50 years, it’s just not doing it in Internet time. But for a place that has been around for 5000 years, the change is very fast. And yes – Delhi’s Airport sucks, but it has been put up for sale along with the Bombay airport, both of which are already in the process of renewal. For more info about the Metro, and the Airport, visit my site.
Buidling could become a Terrorist target? Come on. As if the terrorists dont already have a million other worthy targets like for example the Indian parliament. Besides, with the smog of Delhi they’ll probably have trouble finding it. If u ask me, more planes will probably crash into it accidently.