Yet Another Reason to Enroll Your Children in Mandarin Language Courses

A little quote from an Associated Press report this week on China’s role in the global skyscraper market:

The U.S. high-rise market is “pretty much dead,” said Dan Winey, a managing director for Gensler, the Shanghai Tower’s San Francisco-based architects. “For us, China in the next 10 to 15 years is going to be a huge market.” China has six of the world’s 15 tallest buildings — compared with three in the United States, the skyscraper’s birthplace — and is constructing more at a furious pace, . . . The shift is so drastic that North America’s share of the 100 tallest buildings will fall from 80 percent in 1990 to just 18 percent by 2012, . . .

And:

China is helping to propel development of skyscraper design and urban planning as developers face government pressure to make buildings environmentally friendly and integrate them into busy cities. The Shanghai Tower will have a double-layer glass exterior to insulate it and cut heating and cooling costs, an advanced feature that might be rejected as too costly in the U.S. or other Western markets, Winey said.

Right wingers in the United States can’t even abide the use of compact flourescent lightbulbs—it’s too lib’rul. The writing is on the wall, O Nebuchadnezzar—the skyscraper wall.