China to make its own Sky tower world's tallest skyscraper

Changsha's Sky City will thrust more than 500m higher than the Sky Tower in Auckland. Photo / Richard Robinson

A Chinese construction company has begun building what it hopes will become the world's tallest building.

The Sky City tower is being built on the outskirts of Changsha, a city in China's Hunan province, and comes with an equally stratospheric price tag of about 5.25 billion yuan ($1 billion).

At a ceremony, Zhang Yue, chairman of Broad Group, the developer behind the project, said the 208-storey skyscraper would be completed by April 2014.

At 834m it would overtake Dubai's 828m Burj Khalifa as the tallest building on Earth.

Next year, Shanghai is expected to rob Taipei of the honour of being home to the "tallest building in Asia" when the 631m Shanghai Tower is completed.

Still, plans for Changsha's Sky City are impressive even by Chinese standards.

It will contain 1.05 million square metres of space, with 202 levels above the surface and six underground, housing apartments, schools, shopping centres, theatres, cinemas, more than 90 lifts and even a hospital. Sky City will also have a "vertical farm" that can provide food for the building's 30,000-plus residents.

"People don't want to have to get on trains or drive a car to get to work," Zhang told a conference in southwest China last month, according to the website of Construction Week.

"Sky City will take some 2000 cars off the road simply because its residents can find most of what they need right where they live."

Changsha's Sky City tower

834m height
1.05 sqm of space
208 storeys
30,000 plus residents
90 lifts
328m height of Auckland's Sky City.