By Franziska Bruner

The dust had barely settled around the collapsed World Trade Center towers last September when architectural pundits began announcing "the death of the skyscraper" -- the end of the high-rise era.

Construction on Kuala Lampur's Petronas Towers in 1996, the world's tallest. (Photo by Associated Press)

Yet only 60-odd blocks away, construction continued on the Time Warner/AOL complex, which will stretch at least 80 stories when completed. Across the world in China, no one postponed work on the future tallest building in the world, the Shanghai World Financial Center.

Was the death announcement premature? Or perhaps greatly exaggerated, to paraphrase Mark Twain?

Most architects and urban planning professors say skyscrapers are just too profitable to go the way of the dinosaurs. With the world's population growing rapidly, and the amount of available land shrinking, skyscrapers remain a relatively cheap way to pack lots of people into a small area.

The Sept. 11 disaster probably won't stop anyone from building new towers, says Nikos Salingaros, a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, who specializes in analyzing skyscrapers mathematically.

Still, Salingaros says, most architects will now be making a serious effort to design safer skyscrapers.

"All this talk of parachutes for executives working on the 100th floor is good for sensational news items," Salingaros says, "but it doesn't address the basic problems."

Those problems, critics like Salingaros say, are myriad.

As the world saw on Sept. 11, offices on high floors are practically unreachable for firefighters. Plastic building components combust easily, making skyscraper fires reach temperatures as high as 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. Those fires then spread quickly down long stairways and air shafts.

One solution, says Andreas Hausler, an architect with Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates P.C., is to design sky lobbies for tall buildings. If a fire breaks out, tenants could then head to an open floor to wait for firefighters instead of crowding into smoke-filled stairways.

Hausler also recommends wider, emergency-lit staircases to ease evacuation and specialized elevators for firemen. Both of these features are already common in Asia, where one of Hausler's current projects, the Kowloon Landmark Building in Hong Kong, is being built.

Still, Hausler says, the changes he envisions would probably not safeguard the building from a Sept. 11-style disaster.

"This was such an unusual event," Hausler said. "There's really no way you can design a building to withstand that."

Other architects agree but suggest reducing the height of new skyscrapers, so buildings could be evacuated more easily.

"Most buildings that are more than 50 stories high are stretching the limits of escapability," says Bruce Fowle, founding principle of Fox and Fowle Architects. "If you're in a staircase that's 110 stories high, and you're walking down, many people physically can't do that."

Buildings higher than 50 stories also use tremendous amounts of energy to pump water so high in the air, Fowle says. And reinforcing mega-towers to withstand wind can be extremely expensive.

"That's not to say it can't be done," Fowle says, "but it's more egotistical and symbolic than anything else to build higher and higher."

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