Leading players in high-rise from across China and around the world gathered in Shanghai from September 16-19, 2014 for the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat annual international conference, which focused on the radical repositioning of our cities in the face of global population growth, urbanization, pollution increase and climate change. The theme of the conference was "Future Cities: Towards Sustainable Vertical Urbanism".

WSP took a stand at the conference, which was manned by our leading tall buildings specialists from China, USA, UK, Australia and Canada. "This was an opportunity for us to show off our global capabilities, particularly our New York expertise in slender buildings, which really put us in a class of our own," said Don Pan, Managing Director, WSP in Greater China.


Don Pan, Managing Director, WSP in Greater China

One of these projects was described by Hezi Mena from New York, in a case study on 56 Leonard Street presented to some 200 people attending a technical workshop on sustainability in high-rise buildings. "Although the building wasn't designed with sustainability as a specific goal, we showed how we integrated many green building features into the structural systems," said Hezi. "The audience was attentive and interested and I very much enjoyed being able to present on one of WSP's many exciting projects."


56 Leonard Street, New York

Susie See, from our San Francisco office, made a presentation entitled "Sustainability with a View" which used the Salesforce Tower as a case study. "I had great fun doing my presentation and felt that the audience was very engaged. I took a lot of questions at the end and talked to a huge amount of people about it on the stand afterwards," Susie commented.


Susie See, Executive Vice President, WSP in the USA

WSP was also mentioned in other people's presentations. Carol Willis, the Director of New York's Skyscraper Museum, told the audience of 650 during the plenary session that super-slender towers are possible because of WSP's engineering expertise. That sets us up well for CTBUH 2015 in New York.


Thomas Tong, Structures Team, London, UK

WSP hosted a table at the conference dinner for a group of prestigious Chinese and international clients. In addition, we sponsored the conference Quiz and one of our projects, l'Avenue in Shanghai, was one of the key sites chosen by the CTBUH for the Technical Tour.

Download conference brochure:

  • English
  • Mandarin Chinese
distributed by