Around 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) separates Chicago from Ho Chi Minh City, but certain architectural typologies are known to transcend borders and travel extraordinary distances. Some 42 years since Skidmore Owings and Merrill oversaw the completion of the iconic Willis Tower in the Windy City, a new skyscraper with a very similar language is now on its way in Vietnam — and it will soon surpass César Pelli’s Petronas Towers to form the highest manmade summit in Southeast Asia.
Designed by major British firm Atkins in partnership with engineers from ARUP, luxury high-rise development Landmark 81 will top out at 1,500 feet (460 meters), making it the tallest structure in Vietnam by some distance — the previous record holder was the Keangnam Landmark 72 tower in Hanoi, the product of a collaboration between HOK and Samoo Architecture. Atkins’ skyscraper comprises 25 square columns of steel and glass, their staggered heights evoking the nine bundled tubes of SOM’s Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower).
Forming the centerpiece of the $1.5-billion Vinhomes Central Park masterplan, Landmark 81 will be a mixed-use complex including a high-end hotel, retail, and private apartments. Desiring to maximize open-air amenity spaces within this dense development, Atkins has incorporated landscaped roof gardens atop each section of the tower, creating accessible urban parks for residents all the way up the building.
The building’s cluster of slender volumes, together with the sharp contrast between the tower’s soaring height and its lower-rise surroundings, also bears some resemblance to SOM’s more recent super-tall structure, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Due for completion in 2017, the building would currently stand as the world’s ninth-tallest — although it will be trumped by numerous other towers currently under construction such as the Lotte World Tower in Seoul by Kohn Pedersen Fox.
