The Little Big One.(Brief Article)

The Torre Mayor ("Biggest Tower") cannot be found in record books. That's because it is still not complete after eight years in the works, and because it will loom a mere 225 meters and 55 stories over Mexico City, not big enough to make an impression in New York or Hong Kong. Its claim to be the tallest building in Latin America has fallen oddly flat even in Mexico, which may be famously macho but is still not given to measuring itself by the size of its construction projects.

Latin America has never had the architectural aspirations of Asia, where the race to displace the United States as home of the tallest skyscrapers still rages. Finished in 1997, the 452-meter Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur are currently the highest buildings in the world. But the Shanghai Financial Center will soon edge them out by eight meters, and India has plans for a 677-meter superscraper that would rise 224 stories in the city of Katangi. In Latin America, the impulse to stake out a piece of the sky is still seen as an odd indulgence of gringos and other outsiders--like the Canadian Paul Reichmann, who is now rushing to complete the Torre Mayor. "The culture of big buildings is something completely new here," says architect Vicente Armendariz, who recalls that when he worked on Mexico City's first skyscraper 40 years ago, locals protested that it would destroy the historic downtown.

There were practical reasons to build low in Latin America. Earthquakes, for one. And even with sweeping economic liberalizations in the 1990s, there was never enough capital around to construct big buildings, or enough of a white-collar work force to fill all those floors. Yet that doesn't quite explain why Latin attitudes were so different from those in Asia, where tremors and money were often an obstacle, too. The late Luis Barragan, the famous Mexican architect, saw skyscrapers as an affront to nature, says his nephew and namesake, also an architect. "In Asia, perhaps the people are more open to change," says Barragan.

It's fitting that the Torre Mayor is the work of an outsider. A reclusive Toronto developer, Reichmann is best known for Canary Wharf in London and the World Financial Center in New York. In 1993, when Reichmann bought prime land on Mexico City's most famous boulevard, the Paseo de la Reforma, President Carlos Salinas was being hailed on Wall Street and in ...