The business of skyscrapers

Eugene (Gene) Kohn is one of the founders of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, or KPF. As the firm's website puts it, he has been responsible for developing ‘a global strategy that has made the firm into a global player’. Some idea of the scale of the operation may be gained from the fact that they are presently working insixteendifferent cities in China and that their completed work there includes the world's third and fourth highest buildings (Shanghai World Financial Center, 2008, at 492 metres and the International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong, 2010, at 484 metres). By comparison, their spiralling Pinnacle building, on site in London just a mile from where I meet Gene Kohn, is a baby at 288 metres, though still comfortably within the world's tallest 100. Such league tables go with the territory. So it seems do jolly nicknames – such as Helter Skelter (for the Pinnacle), Shard, Walkie-Talkie, Cheese Grater and Gherkin – whose kindergarten quality belies the highly competitive market they represent for architects and their clients as well as their users. As a business, KPF itself was successful almost as soon as it opened its doors in 1976. The timing and manner of that beginning are revealing. Kohn's partners were both good friends but chosen for different reasons, in the case of Sheldon Fox because he was, as Kohn told me, ’more of a manager, a fine architect but extremely conservative … I thought it would be good if somebody who wasn't like me shared the balance‘ [with Bill Pedersen]