Looking Ahead: Big Builds Dominate 2013

Sara Pepitone -- Interior Design, 12/1/2012 2:00:00 AM

London's mixed-use tower the Shard by Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Image courtesy Sellar Property Group.

The World's Smallest House   At one square meter, it's DIY, transportable, and affordable. Van Bo Le-Mentze's Berlin-based firm Hartz IV Möbel partnered with the BMW Guggenheim Lab to create one tiny house.   The plans are free. For about $300 in supplies and one day's labor, you can sleep by turning the house on its side, or work on a fold-out desk when the house is upright. Photo by Daniela Klein.

While the global economic downturn has resulted in less construction worldwide, some of what is being built is the biggest the world has ever seen. Don't they say go big or go home? And big doesn’t just mean girth.

Emporis says the world’s highest skyscrapers are getting even higher. When the 10 tallest buildings currently under construction are complete
(six in China and two in South Korea, all over 1,673 feet high) only SOM's Burj Khalifa in Dubai will remain on the top ten list. At 2,717 feet, the engineering wonder will also maintain its number one position. The 2,126-foot-tall Ping'an International Finance Center in Shenzhen, China, by
 Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates is expected to be number two in 2015.

But tall is not all these days. There's also a trend towards the creation
of entire new city zones such as the 17.2-million-square-foot King
Abdullah Financial District in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and massive redevelopment projects taking place in London, Hamburg, and elsewhere. These expensive and time-consuming ventures encompass everything
from mixed-use complexes to transportation.

However, you may have heard that Foster + Partner's Crystal Island superstructure in Moscow - what would have been the world's largest
single building at 27-million square feet - has been cancelled.

The largest single-structure projects still on track are tricky to nail down. We've selected four remarkable projects - boasting the most square feet
we could find - that made considerable strides in 2012 towards actually
opening sometime soon.

Learn about them below, then watch what happens in 2013:


The Shard in London, England










Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Egypt










Singapore National Stadium at the Singapore Sports Hub in Singapore








New Karolinska Solna University Hospital in Solna, Sweden










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