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Back Down to Earth A U.S. irony: Demand for tall buildings is in short supply

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问题                        Back Down to Earth
    A U.S. irony: Demand for tall buildings is in short supply
                                                             —by Rick Hampson
    In this, the nation that invented the skyscraper, the tallest private building under construction is a pipsqueak (小人物)                                             —just 30 stories.
    But overseas, the sky is the limit.
    In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the twin Petronas Towers (双子塔) are rising to the heavens
         —they will be the world’s tallest buildings, the first time that title has passed overseas.
    It probably will stay there. Ten years ago, the world’s 10 tallest buildings were in three U.S. cities; as recently as 1993 there were a half dozen proposals to build the next world champ here.
    But none was ever built, and today only 10 buildings over 20 stories are going up in the entire nation. By the turn of the century, six of the world’s 10 tallest are expected to be in Southeast Asia.
    Has the American skyline topped out (封顶)? Is the signal achievement of America architecture drifting toward its twilight?
    "The skyscraper is an artifact of an era when technology was frail and transportation inefficient, and people had to be together to do their jobs." says David Birch, president of Cognetics, a Massachusetts marketing and economic research firm.
    "The need for new ones now is nil. There is no logical reason to ever build another Empire State Building."
    Last year, in fact, Bethlehem Steel closed the mill that made steel for the Empire State 65 years ago, citing the decline in high-rise construction.
    Now, America has so much vacant high-rise urban office space there probably will be no need for more at least until the turn of the century.
    About 43 percent of all U.S. office space was built in the last decade, as developers scrambled (争夺) to house the exploding demand. Boston, for example, increased its space from 21 million to 45 million square feet.
    But after the stock market crash of 1987, the economy slowed down. The national downtown office vacancy rate is 16.7 percent, —about 2.5 times higher than the real estate industry considers healthy. In Dallas the rate is 37 percent; in Miami, 27 percent; in Baltimore, 25 percent.
    In Seattle, neither the city’s first skyscraper (the Smith Tower, 1914) nor its last (the AT&T Gateway Tower, 1990) are generating enough rent to service their debt.
    The 62-story Gateway, which cost ＄ 200 million, was on sale earlier this year for half that price. The building has never been more than half occupied, and the original investors lost their entire investment.
    Three years ago the German media conglomerate (集团公司) Bertelsmann snapped up (抢购) a new, never-been-occupied mid-Manhattan office tower for ＄119 million —a third of what it cost its bankrupt builder.
    Meanwhile, fundamental changes in the way we work are reducing the future demand for office in the clouds.
    Corporate America is getting leaner.
    An increasingly competitive world economy forces companies to cut costs, the biggest of which are office workers and the space they occupy. U.S. companies eliminated more than a half million positions last year alone; there are fewer jobs in Manhattan now than 10 years ago.
    By one estimate, Fortune 500 layoffs have made 250 million square feet of office space available for sublease (转租), the equivalent of 250 Chrysler Buildings.
    The office is getting more suburban.
    Suburbs are popular places for office buildings because they are where most workers are, and where most criminals are not.
    Sometimes in the late 1980s or early 1990s, the suburbs passed the cities in office space. Today, the suburban share is 60 percent and rising.
    Because suburban land is relatively cheap, there is no reason for skyscraping construction, an endeavor in which everything from the pipes to the construction loan costs more.
    Suburban office buildings rarely go above six stories —the height of most city office buildings before the perfection of the electric elevator and the steel frame over 100 years ago.
    A high-tech economy produces low-rise buildings.
    If the elevator and the steel frame gave birth to the skyscraper, the computer may kill it. The information superhighway will allow more companies to leave the city and generally decentralize, just as the interstate highways did after World War Ⅱ.
    David Birch, the consultant, calls digital information (the type processed by computers) "a solvent (溶剂) that decomposes  (分解) building types."
    Telecommuting —working from home via phone, fax and PC —used to be the employee’s dream. But because it saves central office space, employers also are enthralled. In 1993, for the first time, involuntarily telecommuters outnumbered voluntary ones.
    Similarly, telecommunications advances allow clerical tasks once performed near a trading desk or sales department to be done anywhere, from Dublin, New Hampshire, to Dublin, Ireland.
    And companies that stay downtown are using less space there. Telephone operators are being replaced by voice mail, automatic dialing and voice recognition systems. Bulky file cabinets and bookcases are being replaced by threeinch square flat discs. Even desks are getting smaller.
    A few companies have tried "hoteling," in which office workers are given a space temporarily, on an "as-needed" basis.
    Skyscrapers, in fact, have never made sense, at least not as real estate propositions. F. W. Woolworth built his Manhattan headquarters an extra 100 feet high in 1913 purely to steal the Metropolitan Life Tower’s title as world’s tallest. There was no market for the space, but he saw the Woolworth Building as a vast advertisement for his chain of five-and-dimes.
    Today, however, there are no plans for a Wal-Mart Tower. A corporate spokesman happily compares the retailer’s two-story home office in Bentonville, Arkansas, to "a big high school."
    Microsoft’s headquarters in suburban Edmond, Washington, doesn’t clear the tree tops. Why should it? The new corporate status symbol, says David, Birch, is far more functional —the electronic communications network.
    Even those who take a more traditional view of real estate admit things have changed.
    "Most corporations are not trying to define themselves with buildings." concedes John Powers of Cushman & Wakefield.
    Signature towers by famous architects (AT&T by Philip Johnson, IBM by Edward L. Barnes) have been abandoned by the companies that built them. IBM needs half the office space it once did, and last fall AT&T held a "Telecommuting Day" to promote the practice among its employees.
    Sears has moved its headquarters from, Chicago, where it built the world’s tallest building in 1974, to a low-rise suburban campus. Last year it finally unloaded (把……处理掉) its tower: it was almost half empty and had lost more than half its value. It also had a new nickname: "The world’s tallest real estate problem."
    This is not to say the skyline is falling. Some workers will always need a place to go to work, and some companies will always want the newest offices, the best views and other advantages.
    Cesar Pelli, the nation’s foremost high-rise architect (and creator of both the Wachovia building and the Petronas Towers), predicts a revival once the office space glut (供过于求) dissipates (消失).
    "Very tall buildings touch us intimately, in deep chords of our psyche." he says, sitting forward in his office chair."It’s a very old human urge, to point toward heaven." But Pelli himself is not sitting on the upper floor of a Third Avenue high-rise. He is in a brick building across from the Yale campus in New Haven —on the second floor.
In this article the author relies chiefly on ______to support his main arguments.
选项
答案facts and statistics
解析
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