Malinvestments from the business cycle are usually hard to detect, easily concealed, or quickly converted to new uses. That doesn’t erase the losses. However, there are instances where investment project are begun that do get stopped in their tracks and abandoned. Here are the 5 tallest skyscrapers that were unfinished.
Building a house is stressful. Building a skyscraper is a nuclear bomb of stress, problems, and carefully-coordinated chaos—chaos that is closely tied to the economy, and that is easily derailed by war, politics, and financial downturns. It’s not an uncommon story. There are plenty of super-tall (over 984 feet) buildings that were proposed but never made it through to reality. Humans have a tendency towards bombast when it comes to skyscrapers. But recently, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat looked at a unique subset of these failed projects that are especially interesting: Super-tall buildings that actually did begin construction, but were never completed. Below you’ll find a few of the buildings that, as proposed, would have become the world’s tallest (or close to it). Keep in mind, there are plenty of other stalled or on-hold projects out there—CTBUH defines unfinished as “when site works had begun, but were completely halted, and no reports indicate that construction will continue.”
