Most recent skyscrapers built in China are the results of globalized commercialization, as international architecture studios leave their footprints around the world. According to an ongoing survey, more than 70% of the skyscrapers in China built in recent 30 years are designed by foreign designers or architecture companies.[1] Star global architects and architecture firms, such as Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Zaha Hadid Architects, Foster and Partners, and von Gerkan, Marg and Partner, all share a piece of this gigantic market.

The globalized background of designing a skyscraper and, more importantly, its nature as an architectural form, which usually features straightforward mass, abstract appearance, and minimized ornaments, make a skyscraper easily irrelevant with the local cultural background. More critically, skyscrapers are too similar to be distinguished from each other, especially in recent years. Skyscrapers are the symbols for the prosperity of one particular company and even the epitome of development of commercial society. Thus skyscrapers are generally designed with similar manners: geometrical masses, grid-like facades, external walls made of glasses and skeleton irons, and other things. They are even designed by almost the same group of architects: international firms and global architects who left their footprints all over the world and benefitted from globalization. Viewers found hard to catch the cultural uniqueness of some skyscrapers. Many of the skyscrapers built in China in recent thirty years are significantly irrelevant with China: they can perfectly fit into Milan, New York, or Dubai without any modifications. The cultural diversity represented by architectures is eliminated by the brutality of modern skyscrapers. The problem emerged: due to the conflicting nature of original Chinese architectural forms and skyscrapers, how skyscrapers in China should be designed, and how these buildings may convey their cultural uniqueness of China.