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Burj Khalifa is not a utilitarian building, and clearly an outlier, so I don't really see why you would use it as an example except to mislead people. The Empir
by Eridrus 9y ago
Burj Khalifa is not a utilitarian building, and clearly an outlier, so I don't really see why you would use it as an example except to mislead people. The Empire State Building which was mentioned in the article has 2.7 million square feet of office space built on 80k square feet of land.
- bane 9y agoIt's an optimization problem. As buildings get taller and taller more and more of the interior space gets taken up by support framework, transportation and utility service bits. The Burj Khalifa is notable because it's also a case where in order to construct a building of its height, the shape of the supporting infrastructure of the building is also fundamentally compromised such that there's less usable interior per unit height. The Pentagon is interesting as a building because it was put up very quickly and remains one of the largest buildings by usable square footage in the world. But of course it's not a raw optimization. There's a 5+ acre center courtyard that's non-structural and each part of the pentagon is composed of 5 concentric "rings" with space between them for natural light to get into the building. Despite this, it's still a more efficient use of land acreage vs. the Burj.