One of the basic arguments of this piece is that skyscrapers have a lower environmental impact than low and mid rise buildings, but that's not necessarily true.

One of the basic arguments of this piece is that skyscrapers have a lower environmental impact than low and mid rise buildings, but that's not necessarily true. The city of Seattle released an updated report for 2013 data on their mandated city wide energy benchmarking. http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/OSE/EBR-2013-report.pdf http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/OSE/EBR-2013-re... I would suggest that these results may not translate well to the rest of the world, Seattle's climate is so mild it's a bit of an outlier. Based on the data collected, mid-rise housing has a lower Energy Use intensity (EUI) than high rise housing, see page 33. Figure 22 on page 51 is also interesting because it looks like the high rise multifamily also has a lower variance than the mid-family. To me that implies there is less room for design improvement, more of the buildings are grouped around the median higher EUI. EUI is the annual energy use per area of building, typically kBtu per square foot in the states. I found these results somewhat counter-intuitive from an Mechanical/Energy Engineer point of view until I thought about it a bit. Ideally a tall dense building has less exterior area per interior area and hence lower heat loss/gain, but in reality skyscrapers tend to have substantially more glazing(windows) than mid rise and the energy load impact of windows is substantially greater than opaque walls, say R-5 to R-20. Also, a high rise provides the opportunity for sophisticated mechanical systems with energy recovery and efficient systems, but in reality sophisticated systems are complicated, often poorly implemented and difficult to maintain leading to excessive energy consumption. Everything can always be designed better in the future, but I would suggest the data doesn't necessarily support that the density skyscrapers bring improves their environmental impact. Granted I'm not taking into account any of the external factors like reduced commutes, transit density, infrastructure density, etc.