22 ms·

Why skyscrapers are so short

292 points by nickswhitaker 5y ago

mindvirus 5y ago
This was a really neat read, thanks for sharing. The thought of a 2 mile high skyscraper is pretty neat. I'm curious if sway is really so easily solved as the article suggests. If elevators are the limiting factor, I wonder how much of an engineering challenge it would be to have multiple elevator cars in a shift. I'm picturing a system where each floor has some number of elevator car parking spots off of the main shafts, and elevator cars move backward then horizontally first to get to the main shaft to travel vertically. The other limiting factor I could see though is limits on parking, public transportation and utilities.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  The problem with making elevator shafts longer is the tensile strength of steel cables; a thicker cable weights more and so for a longer and longer cable more and more of the cable is only around to carry the cable itself, much the same way as increasing payload on a rocket. Thicker cables require bigger sheaves to avoid fatigue, but the sheave can't be larger than about half the shaft width. Just gets impractical. The solution is cable-less elevators. Rack and pinion elevators seem to be used only for construction elevators, guessing NVH is not up to snuff. Thyssen Krupp has maglev elevators though (experimental): https://engineered.thyssenkrupp.com/en/multi-our-sideways-moving-elevator-system/ https://engineered.thyssenkrupp.com/en/multi-our-sideways-mo... edit: Also if you go too fast it'd be really uncomfortable due to the air pressure changing too quickly. Vertical acceleration is also really unpleasant, personally I find the quickly accelerating elevators I've used to be very nauseating.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Other option is to use something other than steel cable. Like carbon fiber, which at least marketing can get realistic use to 1000m...
    - grosswait 5y ago
      Why not synthetic line? I think high-end winch cables are made out of poly propylene now and exceed the strength of steel for a given diameter
      - csdvrx 5y ago
        > Why not synthetic line? Fire.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    >Thyssen Krupp has maglev elevators though Yes they do! I'm glad you mentioned them cause it isbpretty legit. I know one of their graphic designers (for brochures and stuff), and he was proud of their experimental elevator in Atlanta, Ga
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  Multi-elevator systems have been talked about for a very long time, similar to trains. The problem is still that these layover spots or crossover points take up floor space. And one bad elevator has the potential to jam up the whole system, compared to today where one bad elevator only impacts its shaft. Manhattan actually has a parking cap; with Manhattan today, the view is that building more parking mostly just encourages people to use it, and to accommodate Manhattan's existing land use would probably require paving over Manhattan, the rivers surrounding it, and a whole lot more.
- galangalalgol 5y ago
  With remote work, why are we still all trying to cram ourselves so close together? Also, why isn't building down economical?
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > With remote work, why are we still all trying to cram ourselves so close together? For one thing, many jobs can't be done remotely. But it's not just about work. People want to go to restaurants, community centers, live entertainment. The more sprawl there is, the fewer people can live within reasonable distance of it. Even if you want to live in a single family home, tall buildings are good. Instead of having to drive an hour through a landscape of other single family homes, you can live in one closer to the city while some of the people who used to live there can live in the city because they prefer being within walking distance to having a half acre of grass. Currently there are more people who want that than most cities have housing units and many of them get priced out, which in turn makes it more expensive to live in the suburbs.
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    > Also, why isn't building down economical? Several issues: * Digging is expensive. There's several factors for this, but some unavoidable stuff include things like "you need to put the stuff you took out of the ground somewhere." * The deeper you go, the hotter it gets. Although it's probably not that bad if you're only digging a mile or so. * Natural light is hard to come by underground. * Groundwater intrusion becomes a much more significant concern. * Having to pump all of the sump water and sewage up to the sewer lines is not going to be fun.
  - rendall 5y ago
    The idea is thrown around enough that it has been named depthscrapers or earthscrapers. There are many articles on it, if you're curious: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=depthscrapers+OR+earthscrapers&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=depthscrapers+OR+earthscrapers&ia=...
- d4nt 5y ago
  A simpler system might be to have dedicated upward and downward shafts, with change over points in the roof and basement. The cars all queue up to go up or down depending on which shaft they’re in. The elevator cars couldn’t have cables of course, but they could be driven by electric motors on the cars themselves (powered by induction), driving a gear wheel that runs on a fixed track on the side of the shaft.
  - cesarb 5y ago
    > A simpler system might be to have dedicated upward and downward shafts, with change over points in the roof and basement. You mean a paternoster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift)?
    - CuriousCosmic 5y ago
      I think a Paternoster wouldn't be viable for a number of reasons (mainly ADA/accessibility). Instead you'd need to have each car independently powered and allow them to communicate back to a central planning server to allow cars to stop without stopping all other cars in the lane (and to prevent other cars from bunching up).
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Elevator problems can be worked around with "sky lobbies" where an elevator only covers a portion of the available floors, then you have a lobby at points in the building where you can stack another elevator on top of the last one. So if you are on the bottom section you can get to any floor in one trip, otherwise its a maximum of two trips. This image shows it off pretty well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_lobby#/media/File:World_Trade_Center_Building_Design_with_Floor_and_Elevator_Arrangement.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_lobby#/media/File:World_Tr...
  - jedberg 5y ago
    That diagram really highlights one of the points of the article -- the taller you go the more space you have to dedicate to elevators. Looking at that plan, nearly 1/3 of the floor space is taken up with elevators.
B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
This is probably the best piece I've read this year, full of relevant historical data. However, the finish was a bit of a letdown: "These building height restrictions make us all poorer [etc.]". I didn't even think, from the build-up, that they were going that way ...
- amelius 5y ago
  Perhaps the author should try to build one in Asia, where there are less restrictions.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
    He even mentioned that the Dubai record holder is mostly empty at the top ...
eminence32 5y ago
> In The Tall Buildings Reference Book, the authors state that under pure gravity loading, a steel-framed building could perhaps reach 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) in height I'm not a civil engineer, so I have no intuition for these types of things. But I'm certain I wouldn't have guessed that the limit here was 3km! My mind can't even visually picture a thing. Note that after this quote, the article immediately discusses other constraints, including lateral loading, which dramatically reduce the upper limits. But I'm still boggling over the idea of a 3km tall tower -- it seems like it would just sink right into the earth!
- nexuist 5y ago
  Fundamentally such a thing has to be possible or else natural occurrences like mountains, waterfalls, cliffs etc. would not be possible since they would collapse on themselves. Steel is stronger than dirt after all.
  - eminence32 5y ago
    Good point, that's true. But mountains also have massive bases over which to distribute the load. I assume in the context of a skyscraper, the overall shape is still very much "skyscraperish" (that is, much taller than it is wide)
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      I don’t think that’s quite accurate. You still need to extend the base to support the top, I imagine a pyramid would be better as well at such heights without futuristic materials.
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    > "else natural occurrences like mountains would not be possible since they would collapse on themselves" One way of looking at how mountains can get so high is to think of them as if they already have collapsed on themselves. There's no more collapsing possible, so they can pile up higher. A lot like the Pyramids, they're so big and so old and haven't fallen down because they can't, they're basically a collapsed heap already. Which is something Isaac Arthur mentions in his YouTube series on space elevators, if you can make the base wider, you can make the top higher, and then you don't need Graphene or Scrith or other future super-strong materials to go high enough (in theory, in practise the base would have to get wider than Earth).
renewiltord 5y ago
Terrific article. It’s funny, but from the beginning I knew he was going to end at concluding we overregulate to the detriment of us all. I think a good rule of thumb is to see if someone in theoretical worse conditions for some outcome is doing better on that outcome. So it isn’t natural conditions that limit San Fransican skyscrapers because Tokyo faces those conditions too. But this is a cool article exploring all this and the economic cost of doing it this way.
- thematrixturtle 5y ago
  FWIW, Tokyo actually has very few skyscrapers for its size, because it lies in an active earthquake zone and much of the city is built on reclaimed land. For a long time the only significant cluster of skyscrapers, including the epic Metropolitan Govt Building (Tocho), was in West Shinjuku because it's known to have solid ground.
socialdemocrat 5y ago
Great article but I didn’t like the whole libertarian take at the end that we are worse off because we don’t follow whatever is optimal is some theoretical free market model. The real world is generally not well captured in unrestrained markets. You got externalities and tragedy of the commons not taken into account. If people always bought what benefitted them and society then nobody would be a heroin junkie, an alcoholic or obese. I don’t think high rise cities are really a path to better societies. I loved high rise building when I was younger but today I must say that most of the cities I enjoy most are not cities with tall buildings. Not everything of value can easily be captured in a market based system. They tend to only capture what can easily be measured. However the things which can easily be measured are often the least important things in life.
- pydry 5y ago
  If we didnt suffer from such a dire shortage of housing I would appreciate your point more. But we do. I have a feeling if expensive city center land became a tax liability (as it should be) rather than a gold-like asset to be jealously hoarded we wouldnt see the NIMBYism that led to this tangled web of regulations.
- quicklime 5y ago
  I’m very much not a libertarian, but I do wish that cities wouldn’t take such an absolute anti high rise stance. Every high rise city has low rise neighbourhoods, but low rise cities don’t have high rise neighbourhoods. So it’s a choice between a mix, or pure low rise, and I really dislike when the low rise people choose to force their taste onto others.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > I don’t think high rise cities are really a path to better societies. I loved high rise building when I was younger but today I must say that most of the cities I enjoy most are not cities with tall buildings. High rise buildings are quite simply a path to better land use in the most valuable and most productive urban centers - think Manhattan. They will always be rare elsewhere, precisely because they do come with drawbacks that make them uneconomical otherwise.
smitty1e 5y ago
The idea of connecting two or three close skyskrapers for additional structural integrity and vertical movement possibilites (forgetting cost) seems an interesting tangent.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  I've always wondered about elevated walkways or little trains providing horizontal transport between skyscrapers and thus also addressing some of the elevator problem. EDIT: Fixing "vertical transportation" to "horizontal transportation"
  - iostream23 5y ago
    Downtown Saint Paul Minnesota has the “skyway system” but I’m not sure it provides any lateral stiffening, rather more movement between buildings above street level in inclement weather
    - ajmurmann 5y ago
      That looks a lot like what I'm thinking of, only that I imagined this at least at the tenth or twentieth floor. That combined with having businesses in floors others than the ground floor, like you more commonly find in Japan.
twelvechairs 5y ago
A few key things the author misses: - The pre-commit issue - In the western world (not always the same in China, Dubai, etc.) most developers work on a debt finance model where they have to sell a certain percentage of apartments or pre-lease a certain amount of office space before the finances come together to develop a tall building. The taller you go the tougher it gets. - Market reactions to complex ownership structures. Owners for office buildings are still typically single institutions. Owners for residential buildings are typically individuals with some kind of shared structure for payment of common building issues. When you get a tall building that contains offices, hotels, residential, retail, etc. it all becomes complex to manage and many potential investors/owners/purchasers have a major feat of this that drive them to simpler mostly single-use structures. - Airspace limitations for aircraft manouvring. Though the enforcement of these varies by country - some are strong on it, others ignore them (Taipei 101 in Taiwan is one that is very close to flightpaths). Helicopters to urban hospitals can also be a big thing.
- greiskul 5y ago
  > Owners for residential buildings are typically individuals with some kind of shared structure for payment of common building issues. This is something that always surprised me of the US. About 5 million people live in condos in the US. 65 million people live in condos in Brazil. It is not common at all in Brazil for buildings to be owned by single individuals. What part of the system creates this difference?
  - resonantjacket5 5y ago
    > What part of the system creates this difference? American local zoning laws forbid building anything besides single family homes in the vast majority of land. Some are even stricter banning even renting out rooms in those one-story homes. (More accurately land nearby commutable jobs, sure one can build apartments in the middle of nowhere, but the housing isn't needed there.)
    - refurb 5y ago
      No, it’s because people want single family homes and America had the space to build them cheap in new cities. When I lived in Singapore most people live in apartments (government public housing). But damn near (not all) would love to own a landed home (single family home) if they can afford it. In Canada my grandparents bought a beautiful single family home when the city was around 60,000. They could afford it because it was on the outskirts, out their back window were farms. Today the city is 1.4M and their neighborhood is “central” and highly desirable. LA saw a population explosion around WW2 because the armament industries paid well and it wasn’t hard to buy your own home due to the massive empty space.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
We need more buildings of up to six stories. We don't need more skyscrapers. The low hanging fruit exists in the general lack of this mid-rise range of buildings in many places. Above six or ten stories, it's actually counterproductive in terms of things like energy efficiency. Many good cities, like Paris, limit skyscrapers by policy on purpose because it's not actually the best human environment. Good urban environments involve a lot of mid-rise buildings clusters together, not a lot of skyscrapers. that Roman residential buildings (insulae) maxed out at around 7 or 8 storeys, with 5 or 6 storeys being more common. One of the reasons for that is that apartment buildings could not include kitchens. Cooking tech was based on using fire to cook and you couldn't build a multi story building with kitchens in every unit because you couldn't put fireplaces in the units. Poor people in Roman cities bought prepared meals from street vendors. They didn't cook at home. Buildings are primarily about meeting human needs. This article seems to fail to adequately understand the ways in which human habitation and human use drive such things far more than physics, technology and similar.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  most places could be dramatically more affordable even if they allowed 3 story buildings… single-family zoning is probably the worst thing to ever happen to urban planning
  - closeparen 5y ago
    I think one reason for the "missing middle" is that it's dense enough to make parking a serious challenge, but not dense enough to make a completely car-free lifestyle attractive. I am not sure I'd give up a car for anything less than Manhattan subway (multiple redundant grade-separated tracks, that go everywhere you need, every 2-3 minutes) and you aren't getting public transit that good on just duplexes.
    - micromacrofoot 5y ago
      there are still a lot of single-family houses near existing public transportation! if parking is really the limiting factor to medium density… we need more remote workers, bike support, and must improve our public transit!
AlbertCory 5y ago
They mention the Monadnock Building, which has no steel skeleton. You can still rent an office in that [1]. It's a beautiful building. I seem to remember seeing window air-conditioners, because it's too old to install central air. Yet people still want to be there. [1] http://www.monadnockbuilding.com/ http://www.monadnockbuilding.com/
shadowofneptune 5y ago
I am surprised that this article did not mention the truest economic limit: the fact that the new tallest buildings in the world are often mostly empty. It took until the 1950s for the Empire State building to turn a profit. The Sears Tower's incredible volume was meant for an expanding Sears that never happened. It's a consistent pattern.
- atmosphereix 5y ago
  It mentions that the the current tallest building is empty in the top 29%
  - ggcdn 5y ago
    Slightly different because the Burj is empty by design, while the other examples were empty due to market forces
  - astroalex 5y ago
    I believe that's different. The top 29% of the Burj Khalifa is unusable by design -- its only purpose is to make the building taller. I believe the OP's point is that when usable space in a building goes unleased, it makes it hard for the investor to turn a profit. Therefore there is no economic incentive to build a taller building. I find this argument a bit hard to understand for another reason, though. If there is no demand for space, then why does anyone construct new buildings, and why is rent so high in places like NYC? It seems to me like there is actually incredible demand for space in dense cities.
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      Many skyscrapers are novel- there is a certain prestige, and thus premium- to having an office in the Sears tower or the Burj Khalifa. That is added on to the fact that skyscrapers are also engineering marvels, and the cost per unit goes up quite a bit once you have to start dealing with those problems, compared to the much more standard 6 story building as an example. An additional novelty factor is that actually supporting the weight of the tower will require different techniques (and significantly higher costs) depending on the type of land the desired build site happens to be on. All of these things create something of a price floor for rents.
russellbeattie 5y ago
Super scrapers amaze me when I think of the logistics of food and water going into the building and garbage and sewage coming out, not to mention the electricity demands, etc. Shanghai Tower for example can hold 16,000 people. That's a lot of flushing toilets.
russellbeattie 5y ago
Off topic, but I'd like to point out a weird "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon" thing that I'm currently experiencing: "Ghost kitchens". I didn't know they existed a few days ago, saw them referenced a couple times recently and now another one buried deep in this article. Weird! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_kitchen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_kitchen
franciscop 5y ago
I don't see it mentioned, but in most of Europe the city center height limit has traditionally been the height of their cathedral/church/etc., Where no building can be taller (closer to God) than them.
- rm445 5y ago
  There's plenty of money in the hands of religious people. Where are the ultra-tall cathedrals? It would be absolutely staggering to see modern construction techniques used with traditional-style facades, to produce church towers competing with skyscrapers.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megachurch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megachurch are the modern cathedrals.
    - rm445 5y ago
      Big congregation, arena-like seating? Check. Incredible 300-metre-plus gothic tower? No. I saw a drawing somewhere online that just captured my imagination - a cathedral-like building on a scale absolutely dwarfing regular buildings. I'm 90% sure it was actually Warhammer 40,000 concept art.
- weberer 5y ago
  Philadelphia had a similar thing in the past where no building would go above the statue of William Penn on top of city hall.
nemo44x 5y ago
When I’m in Paris I always try and find time with the Eiffel Tower. I try and put myself in the mind of a person from the 19th century and how this structure must have appeared to them. How it made them feel. It was the beginning of modernism and a new world we are in today. A true line of demarcation from the previous era to a new era. An unbelievably important structure.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  If I was alive back then I 100% would not have went up on the Eiffel Tower for fear that it would collapse because giant metal buildings were so new.
- thejackgoode 5y ago
  I feel like the opposite POV must be presented here, maybe someone thinks like I do. When I first went to Paris I started with a boat ride along the Seine. I was flabbergasted by the beauty of the city. When at the end of the 90 min ride we turned the last turn and I saw the Eiffel Tower it was the biggest disappointment — it looked like a rusty nail in the Victorian painting. It looks nice when lighted at night though.
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    Agreed. It's ugly and not very impressive. Still fun to sit on the lawn facing it at night with a beer or bottle of wine though.
  - nemo44x 5y ago
    I think you need to view it through the lens of a person from when it was made. Consider that it was the first structure to be built by engineers, not architects (that’s revolutionary) and it gave a top-down view of the city, something never possible before. We take all of this for granted much like we take most of modern life for granted. But the Eiffel Tower marked the beginning of modernism. Look at a lot of visual art from that era - it features the Eiffel Tower for instance. It was a shocking structure for its time. It was the beginning of the mechanical and Industrial Age. Just fascinating.
ggcdn 5y ago
This was really well written and researched, and I say that as a structural engineer who predominantly designs tall buildings. I’m not at all libertarian with respect to things like building codes which protect life safety, but I do agree that we over scrutinize aesthetics and architectural aspects of buildings. When I think of neat places I’ve been to, places that really filled my senses, awed, inspired, they were not the sterile developments approved by zoning and urban design panels. They were more organic. Some examples of the places That come to mind include Rhodes, water towns outside of Shanghai, and random plazas in Florence. I believe we need to trust that people generally want to make the world beautiful, and let them do it in their own way. I certainly won’t have the same eye to beauty as everyone else, but that’s okay. It makes the world quirky and unique.
chrisweekly 5y ago
Speaking of tall buildings, I just finished reading Neal Stephenson's short story "Atmosphaera Incognita". Recommended!
andrewfromx 5y ago
Theses are also short https://oceanbuilders.com/ https://oceanbuilders.com/ but I could see them get taller and eventually be skyscraper floating cities.
praveen9920 5y ago
One interesting aspect I really wanted more of is the evolution of buildings/architecture based on legal restrictions. It is good example of man made natural selection process where you change the environment conditions ( legal ), you see different set of beasts ( skyscrappers ) getting evolved
jonplackett 5y ago
This reminded me of a tangentially related Wikipedia article I read a while back on ‘Spite Houses’ That is, buildings created purely out of spite for a neighbour. There’s some very funny examples. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spite_house https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spite_house
drak0n1c 5y ago
I wonder if a multi-block-radius arcology as dreamt of in sci-fi will ever be built. Probably would require technology allowing both building strength improvements and construction cost reductions (automation?) along with reform of the legacy skyscraper regulations described in the article. Of course massive economic price pressure and/or governmental action would be needed for such a project. It may have to piggyback off of a more critical infrastructure project, such as the support structures/legs of a space elevator (like Zalem in Battle Angel Alita).
xchaotic 5y ago
China has stopped construction of building over 100m and for a good reason. Tall building are incredibly inefficient - you literally have to haul everything high up - water, furniture, more recently cars. Ta bigger height to width ratio, the more bottlenecked the transit systems (elevators) become. Likewise for heating, a very tall skinny building has a much larger surface area to a shorter and wider one that houses as many units, plus it has more exposure to high winds and colder temps high above. I think skyscrapers look cool, but from a practical point of view they're pointless, especially in places like Dubai, where land (plot size) is not yet an issue.
iostream23 5y ago
Skyscrapers are disproportionately tall for their width. This leads to the mentioned lateral movement issues discussed. The great pyramid of Giza does not have such issues due to its literal pyramidic shape with its wide base. It would seem to me, purely based on common sense, that skyscrapers are unnecessarily tippy and flexy due to the bizarre interest in making a thin needle-like building with a small base section. Why would we not consider simply making tall buildings proportionally wide instead of this obviously flawed tippy needle thingy? Problems with tippy needles include: foundations and their connections to bedrock, simple physical fulcrum principles, and the obvious inability to spread forces over a larger area. It’s a bit like trying to hold a large Christmas tree up with a small stand with low mass… doomed to problems
- analog31 5y ago
  Nobody wants to live or work on the inside. People like windows and natural light. There's a premium on having a high surface-to-volume ratio.
  - iostream23 5y ago
    Good point, I wonder if light shafts ameliorate that sufficiently, or altered internal topologies, like cutouts
    - analog31 5y ago
      Maybe an array of towers, buttressed together by walkways.
      - gpm 5y ago
        Enough walkways would also alleviate the elevator problem, by reducing the need for vertical travel.
        mattlondon 5y ago
        They tried that in the UK in the post-war era of building residential low-rises. Universally hated. People didn't want to only go where the walkways let them go. Turns out we're lazy (https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/oct/02/walkways-in-the-sky-the-return-of-londons-forgotten-pedways https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/oct/02/walkways-in-t...). They are making a slight comeback but as more of a leisure thing I think - somewhere nice/novel to go for a stroll on a sunny day, rather than when doing your morning power-walk from the tube/bus station to your office etc (e.g. New York high line type thing)
aaron695 5y ago
trembonator 5y ago
fergonco 5y ago
I realized trying to get 3d terrains printed that we are very impeded in the Z axis. If you don't multiply Z by a factor your map will be almost flat. Everest? 8 miserable km? Come on, I can do that on the horizontal with one leg (ok, maybe not but you get the point).
leto_ii 5y ago
I will contribute by adding a couple of references to AdamSomething's views on skyscrapers [1] (we shouldn't build them) and commie blocks [2] (surprisingly pleasant and efficient housing): [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HXZ_0wOY96E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HXZ_0wOY96E [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1eIxUuuJX7Y https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1eIxUuuJX7Y As an Eastern European who lately has developed a casual interest in urban planning, I wholeheartedly agree with a low to mid-rise approach to urban development. Both in my home town (Bucharest) as well as in my current place of residence (Amsterdam) by far the least pleasent areas are the places where high-rises concentrate (Pipera and Zuidas respectively).
choeger 5y ago
As usual the goal is to pack ever more humans in ever smaller spaces for the sake of economy. I prefer to have a smaller community across a larger space, thank you very much. I have the internet to connect to everyone globally, if that's not enough to be innovative, again, thank you very much. I love to go to work by bike, for instance. Free sky is an important part of the fun of it. I couldn't imagine just hopping in some huge elevator, enter the subway in the basement just to enter the elevator in an office building.
sam_goody 5y ago
OT, but the two tallest structures in the U.S. are in a empty rural area in North Dakota - television antennae. I believe that federal law now prohibits any other antennaes from overtaking them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_in_the_United_States_by_height https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_in_...
lkrubner 5y ago
I suggest this is the wrong conversation to have. I'd put it this way: I love Paris, with its buildings of 5 or 6 stories, and I love New York City (where I live) with its taller buildings. But both cites suffer the same problem, which is that the roads are used for all purposes. If you are a pedestrian, and you want to go into a store to buy bread and cheese and wine and coffee, the bread and cheese and wine and coffee need to be brought in by a truck that will be using the same streets that people use to get around on/in their cars or Vespas or bicycles or taxis. Only a few cities in the world have ever been serious about building a second level of walkways, for pedestrians, and typically these pedestrian walkways only cover a few blocks in the downtown area. Nor are the walkways truly fundamental to the architecture of the city, and by that I mean one rarely sees retail stores on the 2nd level, but rather, pedestrians are expected to go back down to the ground floor once they need to actually do something, like buy something at the store. Cities of the future will have to commit to that 2nd level, as well as a 3rd and 4th level. And at some point, these walkways need to be built not just for pedestrians but for any 2 wheel vehicles, including bikes and Vespas and mopeds. This issue is more important than whether the buildings should max out at 5 floors or 50.
- willbudd 5y ago
  Many of the big city centres in Japan are interconnected above and below ground at multiple levels just like that though. Umeda is a fun three dimensional labyrinth, for example.
- ectopod 5y ago
  The amount of traffic needed to service local stores is tiny. One or two vehicles per shop per day at most. My local high street is pedestrianised but permits access for delivery vehicles. On a typical shopping trip I'll see one or none. It works well. The key is removing the through traffic. Walkways are unnecessary.
samwillis 5y ago
While reading the section on elevators I got the overwhelming urge to play Sim Tower… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower
deepsun 5y ago
Why don't they build down? In a typical skyscraper there that many seats at the windows anymore, most workplaces are closer to the center, where there are no daylight anymore anyway.

292 points by nickswhitaker 5y ago

This was a really neat read, thanks for sharing. The thought of a 2 mile high skyscraper is pretty neat. I'm curious if sway is really so easily solved as the article suggests. If elevators are the limiting factor, I wonder how much of an engineering challenge it would be to have multiple elevator cars in a shift. I'm picturing a system where each floor has some number of elevator car parking spots off of the main shafts, and elevator cars move backward then horizontally first to get to the main shaft to travel vertically. The other limiting factor I could see though is limits on parking, public transportation and utilities.

formerly_proven 5y ago
The problem with making elevator shafts longer is the tensile strength of steel cables; a thicker cable weights more and so for a longer and longer cable more and more of the cable is only around to carry the cable itself, much the same way as increasing payload on a rocket. Thicker cables require bigger sheaves to avoid fatigue, but the sheave can't be larger than about half the shaft width. Just gets impractical. The solution is cable-less elevators. Rack and pinion elevators seem to be used only for construction elevators, guessing NVH is not up to snuff. Thyssen Krupp has maglev elevators though (experimental): https://engineered.thyssenkrupp.com/en/multi-our-sideways-moving-elevator-system/ https://engineered.thyssenkrupp.com/en/multi-our-sideways-mo... edit: Also if you go too fast it'd be really uncomfortable due to the air pressure changing too quickly. Vertical acceleration is also really unpleasant, personally I find the quickly accelerating elevators I've used to be very nauseating.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Other option is to use something other than steel cable. Like carbon fiber, which at least marketing can get realistic use to 1000m...
  - grosswait 5y ago
    Why not synthetic line? I think high-end winch cables are made out of poly propylene now and exceed the strength of steel for a given diameter
    - csdvrx 5y ago
      > Why not synthetic line? Fire.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  >Thyssen Krupp has maglev elevators though Yes they do! I'm glad you mentioned them cause it isbpretty legit. I know one of their graphic designers (for brochures and stuff), and he was proud of their experimental elevator in Atlanta, Ga
bobthepanda 5y ago
Multi-elevator systems have been talked about for a very long time, similar to trains. The problem is still that these layover spots or crossover points take up floor space. And one bad elevator has the potential to jam up the whole system, compared to today where one bad elevator only impacts its shaft. Manhattan actually has a parking cap; with Manhattan today, the view is that building more parking mostly just encourages people to use it, and to accommodate Manhattan's existing land use would probably require paving over Manhattan, the rivers surrounding it, and a whole lot more.
galangalalgol 5y ago
With remote work, why are we still all trying to cram ourselves so close together? Also, why isn't building down economical?
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > With remote work, why are we still all trying to cram ourselves so close together? For one thing, many jobs can't be done remotely. But it's not just about work. People want to go to restaurants, community centers, live entertainment. The more sprawl there is, the fewer people can live within reasonable distance of it. Even if you want to live in a single family home, tall buildings are good. Instead of having to drive an hour through a landscape of other single family homes, you can live in one closer to the city while some of the people who used to live there can live in the city because they prefer being within walking distance to having a half acre of grass. Currently there are more people who want that than most cities have housing units and many of them get priced out, which in turn makes it more expensive to live in the suburbs.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  > Also, why isn't building down economical? Several issues: * Digging is expensive. There's several factors for this, but some unavoidable stuff include things like "you need to put the stuff you took out of the ground somewhere." * The deeper you go, the hotter it gets. Although it's probably not that bad if you're only digging a mile or so. * Natural light is hard to come by underground. * Groundwater intrusion becomes a much more significant concern. * Having to pump all of the sump water and sewage up to the sewer lines is not going to be fun.
- rendall 5y ago
  The idea is thrown around enough that it has been named depthscrapers or earthscrapers. There are many articles on it, if you're curious: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=depthscrapers+OR+earthscrapers&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=depthscrapers+OR+earthscrapers&ia=...
d4nt 5y ago
A simpler system might be to have dedicated upward and downward shafts, with change over points in the roof and basement. The cars all queue up to go up or down depending on which shaft they’re in. The elevator cars couldn’t have cables of course, but they could be driven by electric motors on the cars themselves (powered by induction), driving a gear wheel that runs on a fixed track on the side of the shaft.
- cesarb 5y ago
  > A simpler system might be to have dedicated upward and downward shafts, with change over points in the roof and basement. You mean a paternoster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift)?
  - CuriousCosmic 5y ago
    I think a Paternoster wouldn't be viable for a number of reasons (mainly ADA/accessibility). Instead you'd need to have each car independently powered and allow them to communicate back to a central planning server to allow cars to stop without stopping all other cars in the lane (and to prevent other cars from bunching up).
Gigachad 5y ago
Elevator problems can be worked around with "sky lobbies" where an elevator only covers a portion of the available floors, then you have a lobby at points in the building where you can stack another elevator on top of the last one. So if you are on the bottom section you can get to any floor in one trip, otherwise its a maximum of two trips. This image shows it off pretty well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_lobby#/media/File:World_Trade_Center_Building_Design_with_Floor_and_Elevator_Arrangement.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_lobby#/media/File:World_Tr...
- jedberg 5y ago
  That diagram really highlights one of the points of the article -- the taller you go the more space you have to dedicate to elevators. Looking at that plan, nearly 1/3 of the floor space is taken up with elevators.

B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago

This is probably the best piece I've read this year, full of relevant historical data. However, the finish was a bit of a letdown: "These building height restrictions make us all poorer [etc.]". I didn't even think, from the build-up, that they were going that way ...

amelius 5y ago
Perhaps the author should try to build one in Asia, where there are less restrictions.
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
  He even mentioned that the Dubai record holder is mostly empty at the top ...

eminence32 5y ago

> In The Tall Buildings Reference Book, the authors state that under pure gravity loading, a steel-framed building could perhaps reach 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) in height I'm not a civil engineer, so I have no intuition for these types of things. But I'm certain I wouldn't have guessed that the limit here was 3km! My mind can't even visually picture a thing. Note that after this quote, the article immediately discusses other constraints, including lateral loading, which dramatically reduce the upper limits. But I'm still boggling over the idea of a 3km tall tower -- it seems like it would just sink right into the earth!

nexuist 5y ago
Fundamentally such a thing has to be possible or else natural occurrences like mountains, waterfalls, cliffs etc. would not be possible since they would collapse on themselves. Steel is stronger than dirt after all.
- eminence32 5y ago
  Good point, that's true. But mountains also have massive bases over which to distribute the load. I assume in the context of a skyscraper, the overall shape is still very much "skyscraperish" (that is, much taller than it is wide)
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    I don’t think that’s quite accurate. You still need to extend the base to support the top, I imagine a pyramid would be better as well at such heights without futuristic materials.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  > "else natural occurrences like mountains would not be possible since they would collapse on themselves" One way of looking at how mountains can get so high is to think of them as if they already have collapsed on themselves. There's no more collapsing possible, so they can pile up higher. A lot like the Pyramids, they're so big and so old and haven't fallen down because they can't, they're basically a collapsed heap already. Which is something Isaac Arthur mentions in his YouTube series on space elevators, if you can make the base wider, you can make the top higher, and then you don't need Graphene or Scrith or other future super-strong materials to go high enough (in theory, in practise the base would have to get wider than Earth).

renewiltord 5y ago

Terrific article. It’s funny, but from the beginning I knew he was going to end at concluding we overregulate to the detriment of us all. I think a good rule of thumb is to see if someone in theoretical worse conditions for some outcome is doing better on that outcome. So it isn’t natural conditions that limit San Fransican skyscrapers because Tokyo faces those conditions too. But this is a cool article exploring all this and the economic cost of doing it this way.

thematrixturtle 5y ago
FWIW, Tokyo actually has very few skyscrapers for its size, because it lies in an active earthquake zone and much of the city is built on reclaimed land. For a long time the only significant cluster of skyscrapers, including the epic Metropolitan Govt Building (Tocho), was in West Shinjuku because it's known to have solid ground.

socialdemocrat 5y ago

Great article but I didn’t like the whole libertarian take at the end that we are worse off because we don’t follow whatever is optimal is some theoretical free market model. The real world is generally not well captured in unrestrained markets. You got externalities and tragedy of the commons not taken into account. If people always bought what benefitted them and society then nobody would be a heroin junkie, an alcoholic or obese. I don’t think high rise cities are really a path to better societies. I loved high rise building when I was younger but today I must say that most of the cities I enjoy most are not cities with tall buildings. Not everything of value can easily be captured in a market based system. They tend to only capture what can easily be measured. However the things which can easily be measured are often the least important things in life.

pydry 5y ago
If we didnt suffer from such a dire shortage of housing I would appreciate your point more. But we do. I have a feeling if expensive city center land became a tax liability (as it should be) rather than a gold-like asset to be jealously hoarded we wouldnt see the NIMBYism that led to this tangled web of regulations.
quicklime 5y ago
I’m very much not a libertarian, but I do wish that cities wouldn’t take such an absolute anti high rise stance. Every high rise city has low rise neighbourhoods, but low rise cities don’t have high rise neighbourhoods. So it’s a choice between a mix, or pure low rise, and I really dislike when the low rise people choose to force their taste onto others.
zozbot234 5y ago
> I don’t think high rise cities are really a path to better societies. I loved high rise building when I was younger but today I must say that most of the cities I enjoy most are not cities with tall buildings. High rise buildings are quite simply a path to better land use in the most valuable and most productive urban centers - think Manhattan. They will always be rare elsewhere, precisely because they do come with drawbacks that make them uneconomical otherwise.

smitty1e 5y ago

The idea of connecting two or three close skyskrapers for additional structural integrity and vertical movement possibilites (forgetting cost) seems an interesting tangent.

ajmurmann 5y ago
I've always wondered about elevated walkways or little trains providing horizontal transport between skyscrapers and thus also addressing some of the elevator problem. EDIT: Fixing "vertical transportation" to "horizontal transportation"
- iostream23 5y ago
  Downtown Saint Paul Minnesota has the “skyway system” but I’m not sure it provides any lateral stiffening, rather more movement between buildings above street level in inclement weather
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    That looks a lot like what I'm thinking of, only that I imagined this at least at the tenth or twentieth floor. That combined with having businesses in floors others than the ground floor, like you more commonly find in Japan.

twelvechairs 5y ago

A few key things the author misses: - The pre-commit issue - In the western world (not always the same in China, Dubai, etc.) most developers work on a debt finance model where they have to sell a certain percentage of apartments or pre-lease a certain amount of office space before the finances come together to develop a tall building. The taller you go the tougher it gets. - Market reactions to complex ownership structures. Owners for office buildings are still typically single institutions. Owners for residential buildings are typically individuals with some kind of shared structure for payment of common building issues. When you get a tall building that contains offices, hotels, residential, retail, etc. it all becomes complex to manage and many potential investors/owners/purchasers have a major feat of this that drive them to simpler mostly single-use structures. - Airspace limitations for aircraft manouvring. Though the enforcement of these varies by country - some are strong on it, others ignore them (Taipei 101 in Taiwan is one that is very close to flightpaths). Helicopters to urban hospitals can also be a big thing.

greiskul 5y ago
> Owners for residential buildings are typically individuals with some kind of shared structure for payment of common building issues. This is something that always surprised me of the US. About 5 million people live in condos in the US. 65 million people live in condos in Brazil. It is not common at all in Brazil for buildings to be owned by single individuals. What part of the system creates this difference?
- resonantjacket5 5y ago
  > What part of the system creates this difference? American local zoning laws forbid building anything besides single family homes in the vast majority of land. Some are even stricter banning even renting out rooms in those one-story homes. (More accurately land nearby commutable jobs, sure one can build apartments in the middle of nowhere, but the housing isn't needed there.)
  - refurb 5y ago
    No, it’s because people want single family homes and America had the space to build them cheap in new cities. When I lived in Singapore most people live in apartments (government public housing). But damn near (not all) would love to own a landed home (single family home) if they can afford it. In Canada my grandparents bought a beautiful single family home when the city was around 60,000. They could afford it because it was on the outskirts, out their back window were farms. Today the city is 1.4M and their neighborhood is “central” and highly desirable. LA saw a population explosion around WW2 because the armament industries paid well and it wasn’t hard to buy your own home due to the massive empty space.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

We need more buildings of up to six stories. We don't need more skyscrapers. The low hanging fruit exists in the general lack of this mid-rise range of buildings in many places. Above six or ten stories, it's actually counterproductive in terms of things like energy efficiency. Many good cities, like Paris, limit skyscrapers by policy on purpose because it's not actually the best human environment. Good urban environments involve a lot of mid-rise buildings clusters together, not a lot of skyscrapers. that Roman residential buildings (insulae) maxed out at around 7 or 8 storeys, with 5 or 6 storeys being more common. One of the reasons for that is that apartment buildings could not include kitchens. Cooking tech was based on using fire to cook and you couldn't build a multi story building with kitchens in every unit because you couldn't put fireplaces in the units. Poor people in Roman cities bought prepared meals from street vendors. They didn't cook at home. Buildings are primarily about meeting human needs. This article seems to fail to adequately understand the ways in which human habitation and human use drive such things far more than physics, technology and similar.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
most places could be dramatically more affordable even if they allowed 3 story buildings… single-family zoning is probably the worst thing to ever happen to urban planning
- closeparen 5y ago
  I think one reason for the "missing middle" is that it's dense enough to make parking a serious challenge, but not dense enough to make a completely car-free lifestyle attractive. I am not sure I'd give up a car for anything less than Manhattan subway (multiple redundant grade-separated tracks, that go everywhere you need, every 2-3 minutes) and you aren't getting public transit that good on just duplexes.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    there are still a lot of single-family houses near existing public transportation! if parking is really the limiting factor to medium density… we need more remote workers, bike support, and must improve our public transit!

AlbertCory 5y ago

They mention the Monadnock Building, which has no steel skeleton. You can still rent an office in that [1]. It's a beautiful building. I seem to remember seeing window air-conditioners, because it's too old to install central air. Yet people still want to be there. [1] http://www.monadnockbuilding.com/ http://www.monadnockbuilding.com/

shadowofneptune 5y ago

I am surprised that this article did not mention the truest economic limit: the fact that the new tallest buildings in the world are often mostly empty. It took until the 1950s for the Empire State building to turn a profit. The Sears Tower's incredible volume was meant for an expanding Sears that never happened. It's a consistent pattern.

atmosphereix 5y ago
It mentions that the the current tallest building is empty in the top 29%
- ggcdn 5y ago
  Slightly different because the Burj is empty by design, while the other examples were empty due to market forces
- astroalex 5y ago
  I believe that's different. The top 29% of the Burj Khalifa is unusable by design -- its only purpose is to make the building taller. I believe the OP's point is that when usable space in a building goes unleased, it makes it hard for the investor to turn a profit. Therefore there is no economic incentive to build a taller building. I find this argument a bit hard to understand for another reason, though. If there is no demand for space, then why does anyone construct new buildings, and why is rent so high in places like NYC? It seems to me like there is actually incredible demand for space in dense cities.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    Many skyscrapers are novel- there is a certain prestige, and thus premium- to having an office in the Sears tower or the Burj Khalifa. That is added on to the fact that skyscrapers are also engineering marvels, and the cost per unit goes up quite a bit once you have to start dealing with those problems, compared to the much more standard 6 story building as an example. An additional novelty factor is that actually supporting the weight of the tower will require different techniques (and significantly higher costs) depending on the type of land the desired build site happens to be on. All of these things create something of a price floor for rents.

russellbeattie 5y ago

Super scrapers amaze me when I think of the logistics of food and water going into the building and garbage and sewage coming out, not to mention the electricity demands, etc. Shanghai Tower for example can hold 16,000 people. That's a lot of flushing toilets.

russellbeattie 5y ago

Off topic, but I'd like to point out a weird "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon" thing that I'm currently experiencing: "Ghost kitchens". I didn't know they existed a few days ago, saw them referenced a couple times recently and now another one buried deep in this article. Weird! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_kitchen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_kitchen

franciscop 5y ago

I don't see it mentioned, but in most of Europe the city center height limit has traditionally been the height of their cathedral/church/etc., Where no building can be taller (closer to God) than them.

rm445 5y ago
There's plenty of money in the hands of religious people. Where are the ultra-tall cathedrals? It would be absolutely staggering to see modern construction techniques used with traditional-style facades, to produce church towers competing with skyscrapers.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megachurch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megachurch are the modern cathedrals.
  - rm445 5y ago
    Big congregation, arena-like seating? Check. Incredible 300-metre-plus gothic tower? No. I saw a drawing somewhere online that just captured my imagination - a cathedral-like building on a scale absolutely dwarfing regular buildings. I'm 90% sure it was actually Warhammer 40,000 concept art.
weberer 5y ago
Philadelphia had a similar thing in the past where no building would go above the statue of William Penn on top of city hall.

nemo44x 5y ago

When I’m in Paris I always try and find time with the Eiffel Tower. I try and put myself in the mind of a person from the 19th century and how this structure must have appeared to them. How it made them feel. It was the beginning of modernism and a new world we are in today. A true line of demarcation from the previous era to a new era. An unbelievably important structure.

edgyquant 5y ago
If I was alive back then I 100% would not have went up on the Eiffel Tower for fear that it would collapse because giant metal buildings were so new.
thejackgoode 5y ago
I feel like the opposite POV must be presented here, maybe someone thinks like I do. When I first went to Paris I started with a boat ride along the Seine. I was flabbergasted by the beauty of the city. When at the end of the 90 min ride we turned the last turn and I saw the Eiffel Tower it was the biggest disappointment — it looked like a rusty nail in the Victorian painting. It looks nice when lighted at night though.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  Agreed. It's ugly and not very impressive. Still fun to sit on the lawn facing it at night with a beer or bottle of wine though.
- nemo44x 5y ago
  I think you need to view it through the lens of a person from when it was made. Consider that it was the first structure to be built by engineers, not architects (that’s revolutionary) and it gave a top-down view of the city, something never possible before. We take all of this for granted much like we take most of modern life for granted. But the Eiffel Tower marked the beginning of modernism. Look at a lot of visual art from that era - it features the Eiffel Tower for instance. It was a shocking structure for its time. It was the beginning of the mechanical and Industrial Age. Just fascinating.

ggcdn 5y ago

This was really well written and researched, and I say that as a structural engineer who predominantly designs tall buildings. I’m not at all libertarian with respect to things like building codes which protect life safety, but I do agree that we over scrutinize aesthetics and architectural aspects of buildings. When I think of neat places I’ve been to, places that really filled my senses, awed, inspired, they were not the sterile developments approved by zoning and urban design panels. They were more organic. Some examples of the places That come to mind include Rhodes, water towns outside of Shanghai, and random plazas in Florence. I believe we need to trust that people generally want to make the world beautiful, and let them do it in their own way. I certainly won’t have the same eye to beauty as everyone else, but that’s okay. It makes the world quirky and unique.

chrisweekly 5y ago

Speaking of tall buildings, I just finished reading Neal Stephenson's short story "Atmosphaera Incognita". Recommended!

andrewfromx 5y ago

Theses are also short https://oceanbuilders.com/ https://oceanbuilders.com/ but I could see them get taller and eventually be skyscraper floating cities.

praveen9920 5y ago

One interesting aspect I really wanted more of is the evolution of buildings/architecture based on legal restrictions. It is good example of man made natural selection process where you change the environment conditions ( legal ), you see different set of beasts ( skyscrappers ) getting evolved

jonplackett 5y ago

This reminded me of a tangentially related Wikipedia article I read a while back on ‘Spite Houses’ That is, buildings created purely out of spite for a neighbour. There’s some very funny examples. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spite_house https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spite_house

drak0n1c 5y ago

I wonder if a multi-block-radius arcology as dreamt of in sci-fi will ever be built. Probably would require technology allowing both building strength improvements and construction cost reductions (automation?) along with reform of the legacy skyscraper regulations described in the article. Of course massive economic price pressure and/or governmental action would be needed for such a project. It may have to piggyback off of a more critical infrastructure project, such as the support structures/legs of a space elevator (like Zalem in Battle Angel Alita).

xchaotic 5y ago

China has stopped construction of building over 100m and for a good reason. Tall building are incredibly inefficient - you literally have to haul everything high up - water, furniture, more recently cars. Ta bigger height to width ratio, the more bottlenecked the transit systems (elevators) become. Likewise for heating, a very tall skinny building has a much larger surface area to a shorter and wider one that houses as many units, plus it has more exposure to high winds and colder temps high above. I think skyscrapers look cool, but from a practical point of view they're pointless, especially in places like Dubai, where land (plot size) is not yet an issue.

iostream23 5y ago

Skyscrapers are disproportionately tall for their width. This leads to the mentioned lateral movement issues discussed. The great pyramid of Giza does not have such issues due to its literal pyramidic shape with its wide base. It would seem to me, purely based on common sense, that skyscrapers are unnecessarily tippy and flexy due to the bizarre interest in making a thin needle-like building with a small base section. Why would we not consider simply making tall buildings proportionally wide instead of this obviously flawed tippy needle thingy? Problems with tippy needles include: foundations and their connections to bedrock, simple physical fulcrum principles, and the obvious inability to spread forces over a larger area. It’s a bit like trying to hold a large Christmas tree up with a small stand with low mass… doomed to problems

analog31 5y ago
Nobody wants to live or work on the inside. People like windows and natural light. There's a premium on having a high surface-to-volume ratio.
- iostream23 5y ago
  Good point, I wonder if light shafts ameliorate that sufficiently, or altered internal topologies, like cutouts
  - analog31 5y ago
    Maybe an array of towers, buttressed together by walkways.
    - gpm 5y ago
      Enough walkways would also alleviate the elevator problem, by reducing the need for vertical travel.
      - mattlondon 5y ago
        They tried that in the UK in the post-war era of building residential low-rises. Universally hated. People didn't want to only go where the walkways let them go. Turns out we're lazy (https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/oct/02/walkways-in-the-sky-the-return-of-londons-forgotten-pedways https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/oct/02/walkways-in-t...). They are making a slight comeback but as more of a leisure thing I think - somewhere nice/novel to go for a stroll on a sunny day, rather than when doing your morning power-walk from the tube/bus station to your office etc (e.g. New York high line type thing)

aaron695 5y ago

trembonator 5y ago

fergonco 5y ago

I realized trying to get 3d terrains printed that we are very impeded in the Z axis. If you don't multiply Z by a factor your map will be almost flat. Everest? 8 miserable km? Come on, I can do that on the horizontal with one leg (ok, maybe not but you get the point).

leto_ii 5y ago

I will contribute by adding a couple of references to AdamSomething's views on skyscrapers [1] (we shouldn't build them) and commie blocks [2] (surprisingly pleasant and efficient housing): [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HXZ_0wOY96E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HXZ_0wOY96E [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1eIxUuuJX7Y https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1eIxUuuJX7Y As an Eastern European who lately has developed a casual interest in urban planning, I wholeheartedly agree with a low to mid-rise approach to urban development. Both in my home town (Bucharest) as well as in my current place of residence (Amsterdam) by far the least pleasent areas are the places where high-rises concentrate (Pipera and Zuidas respectively).

choeger 5y ago

As usual the goal is to pack ever more humans in ever smaller spaces for the sake of economy. I prefer to have a smaller community across a larger space, thank you very much. I have the internet to connect to everyone globally, if that's not enough to be innovative, again, thank you very much. I love to go to work by bike, for instance. Free sky is an important part of the fun of it. I couldn't imagine just hopping in some huge elevator, enter the subway in the basement just to enter the elevator in an office building.

sam_goody 5y ago

OT, but the two tallest structures in the U.S. are in a empty rural area in North Dakota - television antennae. I believe that federal law now prohibits any other antennaes from overtaking them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_in_the_United_States_by_height https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_in_...

lkrubner 5y ago

I suggest this is the wrong conversation to have. I'd put it this way: I love Paris, with its buildings of 5 or 6 stories, and I love New York City (where I live) with its taller buildings. But both cites suffer the same problem, which is that the roads are used for all purposes. If you are a pedestrian, and you want to go into a store to buy bread and cheese and wine and coffee, the bread and cheese and wine and coffee need to be brought in by a truck that will be using the same streets that people use to get around on/in their cars or Vespas or bicycles or taxis. Only a few cities in the world have ever been serious about building a second level of walkways, for pedestrians, and typically these pedestrian walkways only cover a few blocks in the downtown area. Nor are the walkways truly fundamental to the architecture of the city, and by that I mean one rarely sees retail stores on the 2nd level, but rather, pedestrians are expected to go back down to the ground floor once they need to actually do something, like buy something at the store. Cities of the future will have to commit to that 2nd level, as well as a 3rd and 4th level. And at some point, these walkways need to be built not just for pedestrians but for any 2 wheel vehicles, including bikes and Vespas and mopeds. This issue is more important than whether the buildings should max out at 5 floors or 50.

willbudd 5y ago
Many of the big city centres in Japan are interconnected above and below ground at multiple levels just like that though. Umeda is a fun three dimensional labyrinth, for example.
ectopod 5y ago
The amount of traffic needed to service local stores is tiny. One or two vehicles per shop per day at most. My local high street is pedestrianised but permits access for delivery vehicles. On a typical shopping trip I'll see one or none. It works well. The key is removing the through traffic. Walkways are unnecessary.

samwillis 5y ago

While reading the section on elevators I got the overwhelming urge to play Sim Tower… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower

deepsun 5y ago

Why don't they build down? In a typical skyscraper there that many seats at the windows anymore, most workplaces are closer to the center, where there are no daylight anymore anyway.