Building Boom

In early December, Liu Zhangning was tending her cabbage patch when she saw a tall yellow construction crane in the distance. At night, the work lights made it seem like day. Fifteen days later, a 30-story hotel towered over her village on the outskirts of the city like a glass and steel obelisk. "I couldn't really believe it," Liu said. "They built that thing in under a month. " A time-lapse video of the project in Changsha, which shows the prefabricated building being assembled on site, has racked up more than 5 million views on YouTube and left Western architects speechless.

Morning light revealed pitched tents and scattered sleeping bags in front of the sales offices of luxury builder Woodbridge Pacific Group. Attracted by a dozen new Huntington Beach homes touted as "starting in the low 1,200,000s," about 15 hopefuls had camped out for days. They were waiting for a chance to get their names on a list to buy into the first phase of a new subdivision. One would-be buyer had flown in a friend from Las Vegas to hold his place in line. Another shopper had hired a pair of men to wait in 12-hour shifts.

Business opportunities and tourism growth in Latin America have inspired a hotel building boom. More than 100 major projects, many of them associated with major U.S. chains such as Clarion, Holiday Inns and Radisson, are expected to open in the next two years. About half the new properties are in Mexico and Venezuela. Here are the 13 most expensive projects, which have a combined value of $487 million. Hotel/City Price (in Opening Country Rooms millions) date Conrad Resort & Casino/ 300 $75.

In early December, Liu Zhangning was tending her cabbage patch when she saw a tall yellow construction crane in the distance. At night, the work lights made it seem like day. Fifteen days later, a 30-story hotel towered over her village on the outskirts of the city like a glass and steel obelisk. "I couldn't really believe it," Liu said. "They built that thing in under a month. " A time-lapse video of the project in Changsha, which shows the prefabricated building being assembled on site, has racked up more than 5 million views on YouTube and left Western architects speechless.

A building boom of sorts is occurring here, creating a dilemma for the merchants and old-time residents of this gold rush boom town. Just how far should this town go in catering to the thousands of tourists drawn here weekly for fresh air, pine trees, apples and pears, wildflowers, mine tours and ice cream at the county's oldest soda fountain? Should Julian offer more amenities to tourists, who are this town's economic lifeblood?

The national tax-reform bill awaiting a vote in the Senate could have a profound impact on development in America's cities and suburbs, and is particularly relevant to the Southland, now in a building boom from Ventura County south to San Diego and east into Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

To look around Shanghai, you wouldn't think that China is struggling to stave off an economic crisis. Cranes hover over sites for new skyscrapers and apartment blocks, though hundreds recently built are half-empty. Bulldozers sweep away old houses and even new buildings to make way for elevated highways. Steamrollers will soon press runways for the city's second international airport. The city is building with a fervor that implies boundless wealth. Thanks to a $1.

Harlem, for generations the Promised Land for blacks seeking a better life, is facing a new wave of immigrants: whites moving uptown for scarce housing. The cost of buying or renting in Manhattan has risen steadily for years, and neighborhoods once ignored by the upwardly mobile have been swept up in wave after wave of gentrification.

Twenty-one thousand new residences to be built around Orange County were approved in the weeks up to and including Election Day. And last week, the Irvine City Council cleared the way for an additional 2,880 new units. This coincidental string of green lights paves the way for a new suburban building boom after years of review, compromise, referendum and politics.

In a darkened sales office 28 floors above Downtown Los Angeles, the corner walls slide away at the touch of a button and sunlight pours in through huge windows. Below, the site of Los Angeles Center comes into view. But instead of the shimmering skyscrapers envisioned a few years ago, Los Angeles Center remains a collection of parking lots surrounding an outdated office building.

Any skyscraper is a contradiction. The tall tower is architecture's most famous building type and also the one most clearly at odds with the profession's roots. Fundamentally, architecture is shelter, a concession that we're afraid to face the elements without protection. A skyscraper is vertical hubris. Perhaps no architect embodied the oddness of skyscraper architecture more than Minoru Yamasaki, the Seattle native who designed the 110-story World Trade Center towers. Yamasaki was afraid of heights; he made the windows of the twin towers just 18 inches wide to ease the fears of the people inside the buildings who shared his anxiety.

Donna and Bob Moran moved to the wind-whipped foothills here four years ago looking for solitude and serenity amid the pinyon pines and towering Joshua trees. But lately their view of the valley is being marred by a growing swarm of whirring wind turbines — many taller than the Statue of Liberty — sweeping ever closer to their home. "Once, you could see stars like you wouldn't believe," Donna Moran said. "Now, with the lights from the turbines, you can't even see the night sky. " It's about to get worse.

Barack Obama returned home this week from his trip to Latin America having showcased two distinctly different faces of presidential power: one humble, the other resolute. He ordered a cruise missile assault against the Libyan regime on the first day of the trip, kicked soccer balls with Brazilian kids on the second. He issued warnings to the Libyan ruler, made a toast to the Chilean president. It was a tough balance to strike: a charm offensive in Latin America paired with a military campaign in North Africa.

Somewhere on Earth there must be a cheaper, easier, more exotic cruise, packed with even more beautiful sights and filled with more history, providing even tastier food, but for now, I'm happy to settle on this one: Ionian Cruises' daily excursion from Corfu, Greece, to Sarande, Albania. How cheap is it? Thirty-eight euros (about $55) for the round-trip boat ride, 19 euros (about $27) for a shore excursion that includes a fabulous buffet lunch. That's about $82 for an enchanting day in Albania, an additional dollar if you want a big glass of wine with lunch.

It's always a little risky to see in one headline about the architecture business, or in the fate of a single firm, a parable for the profession as a whole. But news that the prefab specialist Michelle Kaufmann has suddenly closed her Oakland office and laid off all 17 of her employees does seem to have Larger Symbolism written all over it. Kaufmann's is hardly the only prefab firm to face trouble in recent months.

"Empty," says Jack Rodman, an expert in distressed real estate, as he points from the window of his 40th-floor office toward a silver-skinned prism rising out of the Beijing skyline. "Beautiful building, but not a single tenant. "Completely empty. "Empty." So goes the refrain as his finger skips from building to building, each flashier than the next, and few of them more than barely occupied.

Grudgingly, New York's capital city is finally learning to live with Nelson Rockefeller's "edifice complex," as some derided the $2-billion project when construction began two decades ago. Since its completion seven years ago, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, with its immense state office building, convention center and museum complex, has become the focus of a building boom that is rejuvenating Albany, one of the oldest cities in North America.

California's continuing prosperity is producing a host of new commercial buildings in the San Fernando Valley as builders scramble to construct new office, industrial and retail space for expanding businesses. Dozens of new commercial buildings were completed or began construction in the Valley during the third quarter alone, joining dozens of others that have either begun construction or been completed since the post-recession building boom began.

A frayed copy of "Don Quixote" was tucked under the front seat of Roberto Oliveros' battered white truck as he sallied forth through the fast-changing plains of central Spain. Where the addled Cervantes hero tilted at windmills, Oliveros and his environmentalist friends see another towering enemy dotting this La Mancha landscape: construction cranes. An unbridled building boom, which first turned much of Spain's once captivating coastline into a mile-wide belt of shopping malls, vacation homes and sunburned foreigners, has more recently spread deep into the country's heartland, endangered some of the most precious and diverse flora and fauna in Europe and sucked an already arid region dry of water.

BEIJING -- On the first morning of my recent stay in Beijing, I picked up the China Daily, the government-run English-language newspaper, to see the following phrase near the top of the front page: "Good Times Get Better." It was a teaser for a story inside the paper about the expanding number of luxury boutiques in the Chinese capital.