The Pair of Pants

 Not too far away from our apartment - just across XingGang Street and South about a block - they are building a new building.   Two buildings actually.  But they will be joined at the top to form an archway...so maybe it should be counted as just one building.   When done, this will be the tallest building(s) in Suzhou.  I've heard it will be 90 stories tall.  That may not make it the tallest building in the world, but it will still be pretty doggone tall.

For the first couple months we were here, there was nothing happening at the construction site.   The towers had maybe 15 stories of steel erected, but there were no workers on the site.  Rumor was that the project had run into funding problems.   For the past couple of months, however, they've been working night and day.  Day and night you can see the flashes of the welders. The towers now poke into the sky significantly beyond the tops of our apartment building.  Someone must have found some money somewhere.

Officially, the building will be called the Gateway to the Orient. The locals have already settled on another name though.  They call it the "pair of pants".   That's because the architect's rendering, which is plastered all over the place, looks surprisingly like a pair of straight legged Levis.....but with windows instead of pockets.  The legs are square as if for an incredibly tall Sponge Bob.

The photo at top shows the construction site.  The photo immediately above is from a model in the Suzhou Planning Exhibition Center.  The model probably covers about 5000 square feet and depicts the government's future vision for Suzhou and the surrounding towns.  The Gateway to the Orient is shown as it will appear on the Suzhou skyline when finished. 

You have to admit, it does look like a pair of pants.

Just to put things in perspective, in the center, just in front of the trousers, you see the concrete expanse of the Rainbow walk.  Zapata's Tex-Mex restaurant would be along the thin strip of concrete to the left.  Just to the right of the Rainbow Walk, you can see the cluster of green that is Camphor Tree Park.  The buildings to the right of that, at the bottom right corner, make up the apartment complex that we live in.  You see them as a cluster of three or four short, stubby towers.  Those buildings are 22 stories tall.