by Brianna Crandall — October 22, 2012—The nearly completed Mercury City Tower in Moscow has surpassed The Shard in London to become the tallest (uncompleted) building in Europe, bringing the distinction to Moscow of claiming five out of the ten current tallest skyscrapers in Europe.
Upon completion by the end of 2012, Mercury City will reach 339 meters (1,111 feet), 29 meters taller than The Shard, which was inaugurated in July and celebrated as Europe’s tallest building with a height of 310 meters. Situated in the nascent Moscow International Business Center, Mercury City Tower will reach 75 stories, with five floors below the ground, comprised mainly of commercial offices and residential condominiums, with some retail and parking.
According to the tower’s architects Frank Williams & Partners Architects , M.M. Posokhin, and G.L. Sirota, Mercury City is Moscow’s first “green” building, meeting rigorous international standards. Emporis says that the tower is designed to use less water and electricity by collecting melting water and providing 75 percent workspace with daylight, and that ten percent of the construction material came from a 300-kilometer radius of the construction site.
Frank Williams & Partners says that the new tower is “sheathed in a light, warm silver glass” that will act as a background to set off the “rich red glass roofscape” of Moscow’s new City Hall, which is situated adjacent to Mercury City Tower.
Moscow, which Frank Williams & Partners notes is going through an architectural renaissance, now counts a total of 87 buildings that are at least 100 meters high or have more than 40 floors. More than two-thirds of them are not older than nine years. This makes Moscow the new European capital of skyscrapers, as the architecture experts from Emporis, the global building database, have concluded during a data analysis.
