Continuing to indulge in an inexplicable fascination with tall buildings, I recently hurtled to the top of Melbourne's Eureka Tower, the 300m-high residential building in the heart of the city's Southbank district.
It's a fantastic view (granted, a landscape of tumbleweeds would still inspire awe at 300m up) and one can even step into a glass-bottomed viewing room jutting out from the building so as to bring on instant vertigo and awkward nausea.
What I find most interesting about tall buildings (which, let's be honest, don't so much scrape the sky as merely poke it in the shins) is the competition between them. It started with the pyramids and shows no signs of abating.
You'd think the status of tallness would be an easy thing to rate, what with the advent of tape measures and all, but no. They nearly all claim a benchmark of superiority based on a raft of ambiguous definitions.
For example, when I mentioned to our guide that Eureka wasn't quite as tall as the Gold Coast's Q1 building, he clearly resisted flicking me in the forehead. "Oh, you mean that spire thing at the top," he drawled campily. "That's not part of the building. It's just a spire. You can't walk around in a spire. The height of a building, darling, is measured according to the highest habitable floor - in this case, the viewing deck. And trust me, honey, ours is higher than Q1's."
"So they sort of cheated?" I said.
"Not at all," he grinned cheekily. "You can only cheat if you're in the race to start with."
Eureka's "race" is in the residential building category, in which it claims to be the highest in the southern hemisphere (the hemisphere distinction always amuses me given that 89 per cent of the world's population lives above the equator). Eureka therefore removes itself from comparison with the Sydney Tower (304m) and Auckland's Sky Tower (328m).
The latter two structures are towers in the true sense of the word (specifically, buildings with less than 50 per cent habitable space), which fails to explain why the developers of Eureka Tower chose to call it so. (The height of stupidity?)
Blowing everyone out of the water at its recent unveiling was Dubai's Burj Khalifa, now officially the tallest man-made structure in the world. This 828m-high sky-teaser wins nearly every category decided annually by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, except "highest observation deck", which is still retained by the Shanghai World Financial Centre.
One gets the feeling, though, that Burj Khalifa is like the Usain Bolt of the construction world - that thing that brings us to finally declare, "Actually, that's plenty amazing enough, thanks". Sure, we could go taller. But why? Soon we'll be too high to see anything with clarity. We'll be getting in the way of well-meaning airplanes. Popping our ears for no good reason.
Most importantly, we'll be sabotaging the most important principle of the tall building: perspective. Indeed it wasn't until I stood at the top of Eureka Tower last week that I finally understood the riddle that is Melbourne. Brown river, crap weather, a thousand or more attractions to abundantly compensate.
Sydney, on the other hand, as viewed from 304m up, looks like a town that rested on three laurels: the bridge, the harbor, the Opera House. Everything else is dreary filler.
carrieon@bigpond.com
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