8 ms·

Which city builds skyscrapers the fastest?

55 points by jseliger 4y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
Once again you can see the absolute mediocrity of Canada seeping through. In every single metric they are the worst out of the developed countries.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
scythe 4y ago
Los Angeles?! He clarifies that it's probably due to a low sample size. But still... LA? It seems like the "surprising" success of the US might be due to skyscrapers being largely built by the private sector, which is pretty good in the US, while American public sector construction is, unfortunately, something of a running joke. Good on him for recognizing the mistake (autocorrelation) in a previous article.
- milleramp 4y ago
  I guessed that Los Angeles would be high on the list, not necessarily first, the amount of construction in downtown has been crazy the last decades. The skyline is so different compared to the 90's.
- xxpor 4y ago
  I can't think of a large scale public construction project recently, in any domain. Everything's contracted out. In Seattle for example you see the exact same contractors building stuff for Google and Sound Transit.
  - paramount 4y ago
    Speaking of Seattle, the 99 tunnel was pretty large in scope with the world's largest tunnel boring machine. Construction started in 2013 and opened to traffic in 2019. "Boring of the tunnel with the 57.5-foot (17.5 m) diameter "Bertha," at the time the world's largest-diameter tunnel-boring machine, began on July 30, 2013,[69][70] and at the time was expected to be completed in 14 months" [1] We also have the lightrail projects with total funding of over $54 billion. Pretty large in scope with variability in success and budget[2] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Route_99_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Route_99_tunnel [2]https://www.constructiondive.com/news/seattle-area-light-rail-transportation-plan-busting-54b-budget/549892/ https://www.constructiondive.com/news/seattle-area-light-rai...
    - com2kid 4y ago
      > Pretty large in scope with variability in success and budget[2] Sound Transit would have better luck if they weren't forced to work under so many constraints. Because money trickles in slowly, and because funding has to come from different cities in a predetermined way, they are stuck with speculators buying up property before Sound Transit is allowed to, and then selling it to ST for inflated prices. Cities that need mass transit right now are not allowed to pay for transit to be built faster in their area. And of course everyone loves to sue them, costing even more $. I still have not figured out why the holy hell there isn't commercial real estate built along with all sound transit stations. We have these large expensive stations that are devoid of any commercial activity, meanwhile Japan sticks Michelin Star restaurants in their transit stations. The Roosevelt station is a notable example of this, huge station, takes up lots of the block, and it is tall, why aren't there at least 2 or even 3 levels of retail space in it?
      - scythe 4y ago
        >I still have not figured out why the holy hell there isn't commercial real estate built along with all sound transit stations. We have these large expensive stations that are devoid of any commercial activity, meanwhile Japan sticks Michelin Star restaurants in their transit stations. In general, the opposite complaint has been raised: US station platforms are too large! I don't know how they do it in Japan, but the train station in Rome has all of the services above ground in a normal building, away from the tracks, while when I've seen coffeeshops and the like at subways in the US, they're often on the platform or at least underground. DC has some truly cavernous stations full of a lot of signs and stale air (and not much else). So it seems like part of the problem is that the subway authority is confined to an unreasonably tight definition of where they can operate, and then they try to cram a camel through the eye of the needle.
  - scythe 4y ago
    Contractors are probably part of the problem: https://slate.com/business/2023/02/subway-costs-us-europe-public-transit-funds.html https://slate.com/business/2023/02/subway-costs-us-europe-pu... Public agencies don't have enough in-house expertise, so they spend more on contractors and consultants than in peer nations (particularly vs. non-Anglosphere). So I'm sorry if it was confusing when I said "public sector", because the problem occurs with public infrastructure projects directed by the government, and the privatization downstream has minimal effect.
- jmclnx 4y ago
  Yes, I agree with this, if a public building probably takes 10x 20x slower. My city was rather fast too, but we still have one bridge Under Construction since 1986 :) They just said it will be replaced any day now
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  My guess is also that it has a lot to do with infrastructure. This is probably why US tall buildings are slower than the rest of world. When a new tower requires metro station access, complex/new electrical work, etc. the US lags because those things take a lot of civic interaction. Meanwhile, LA's midrise towers have almost no new infrastructure requirements and can just start rising.
  - scythe 4y ago
    US tall buildings are not slower than the rest of the world. That's the biggest surprise in the data, and it persists under different analytical methodologies.
    - RC_ITR 4y ago
      > If we look only at the very tallest buildings, China builds much faster than the US. ??
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Do you have data on the public vs private sector rates? Running jokes are not evidence (except of groupthink).
  - scythe 4y ago
    It's very difficult to put a direct comparison, because the government usually does not build skyscrapers, and the private sector almost never builds public transit. But you see dramatic shortfalls in US cost and rate on the construction of major transit infrastructure compared to peer nations: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-america https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/22534714/rail-roads-infrast... As I detail in a cousin comment, privatizing the construction process itself does not help (and might make matters worse), but it surprised both the author (of TFA) and me to see that the US is competitive when the whole project is privatized — possibly implying that the government is making mistakes in administration particularly.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      Maybe the government takes on tasks that private sector companies don't believe they can make work.
      - scythe 4y ago
        It's not impossible. But again, the contrast has four parts: - Eurasian private sector, works - Anglosphere private sector, works (except in Canada) - Eurasian public sector, works - Anglosphere public sector, confounded by cost overruns If it's a simple result of scope, it remains to be explained why similar projects are harder in the English-speaking world than in Italy, China, Japan or Mexico (yes, even Mexico has substantially lower costs!). My other comments in this thread offer more details.
tromp 4y ago
I had expected to see Dubai there, but apparently, they're too slow to make the charts. Neom's The Line should easily top the charts if (BIG IF!) it gets realized in the next few decades. 170kmx200m area of skyscraper quickly adds up sq ft...
- runnerup 4y ago
  The Line is a scam. Not sure exactly who is being scammed vs. doing the scam but it’s delusional and will never amount to anything. It’s not an “if”, it’s just not real.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    I've heard it generally suggested that it's the Crown Prince scamming himself. He wants the massive monument to himself and headlines about all its fantastic new ideas, he has the money to bankroll it, and consultants will happily take large multiples of their usual fee to agree with his ideas.
- kspacewalk2 4y ago
  > 170kmx200m area of skyscraper Not really an if. This will never get built.
photochemsyn 4y ago
I'm not sure that construction speed is the metric you want to optimize when it comes to skyscraper construction, although I suppose robustness is built-in to all the designs these days. A quick search for robust skyscraper design turns up this interesting effect-of-9/11 discussion: https://www.dezeen.com/2021/09/07/911-anniversary-skyscrapers-design/ https://www.dezeen.com/2021/09/07/911-anniversary-skyscraper... Skyscrapers also have a footprint that might no be immediately obvious - it's their energy, water and food demand. Assuming they're inhabited by humans, what's the amount of agricultural land needed to provide for those humans? What's the energy demand, how many modular 100 MW nuclear power plants or hectares of solar PV panels (plus associated 24/7 storage/distribution centers) are needed to keep the elevator, lights, pumps, ventilation and heating/AC functioning? How much water do they consume daily? That's the kind of 'skyscraper footprint analysis' that architects should be asked to submit for any building design.
- kredd 4y ago
  Pardon my general ignorance in this topic, but it’s those energy, water and food demand would still be applicable no matter where people live, no? The denser the population, easier to deliver said things (something alike economy of scale). Unless i’m missing something?
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    Well, the two extremes would be an even distribution of small homes over the entire agricultural footprint space for the human population, vs. all the humans living in a giant skyscraper surrounded by the agricultural (and energy, and water) production zone. Each setup has certain advantages and disadvantages (transport from field -> skyscraper has a cost, vs. local availability of basic resources, but on the other hand, if you have to run fiber optic to every household, that gets expensive). In terms of delivery, it depends on lot on the mass of what's being delivered. If we want to go larger, then imagine multiple installations like this, perhaps specializing in different production capabilities, and trading among one another. Sort of a Factorio gameplay scenario. Basically, would skyscrapers (or underground versions) be the best way to colonize Mars (you'd still need the large agricultural zones)? See also Mad Max: Fury Road for the dystopian version (BulletFarm, GasTown, and Hydroponics/Milk IIRC). Back on Earth, the issue would be that if you doubled the population density of a city by building a lot of skyscrapers without also doubling the regional agricultural zone size, you'd end up dependent on import of foodstuffs from remote regions, which could become a problem.
chollida1 4y ago
I'm surprised Toronto was so low. I've read reports that for 3 years in a row the city has had the most active construction cranes of any north American city. I guess it could be that alot of Toronto's buildings don't hit the sky scraper designation?
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  Wouldn't that statistic hold if Toronto were building the normal number of skyscrapers, but were particularly slow about it? If a city starts 1 building/year and buildings take 5 years to build, the steady-state average will be 5 simultaneous active construction sites. On the other hand, if it takes 10 years to build a building, there will be 10 simultaneous active sites.
  - Kon-Peki 4y ago
    The more likely explanation is that the author has excluded everything less than 100 meters in height. That's somewhere between 30 and 35 floors. You'll be using a "permanent" construction crane for anything greater than 10 or 12 floors - a lot of buildings that use a crane are simply not being counted. FYI - in high-rise construction, the foundation is designed to have a space for the construction crane. It is anchored to the foundation at the beginning of the project and removed at the end. IE, for the duration of the project the crane is part of the building. Shorter buildings will have a "portable" crane, even if it is on-site for a long period of time.
- arecurrence 4y ago
  I scrolled through and didn't see anywhere that they defined what "complete" meant. It could be as simple as Canada counts a skyscraper as completed when the first residents move in versus perhaps America counts it as completed when the roof is done. This may initially sound dumb... but it can mean a lot "legally speaking". My understanding is Canada and America have very similar building codes and construction plans. Indeed, many of these construction companies are multinational.
rossdavidh 4y ago
I suspect that, because so much of the time required is either political or organizational, the part that's left (which would be expected to go up with increasing size) is not actually enough to make a very big correlation between size of building and time to complete. Which means "builds skyscrapers the fastest" actually means something more like "builds the biggest skyscrapers".
wolverine876 4y ago
I'd like someone with expertise to analyze this data. Often blunt data like what's in this article can mislead outsiders. For example, how is the start defined? Maybe that's a technicality, depending on local permitting laws. Maybe post-construction legal or regulatory issues are involved. Maybe it's tied to weather or the ground. I'm just making up possilities - the point is, I have no idea myself.
antipaul 4y ago
Is the metric right? It’s not how quickly you can get a tower up It’s average speed of square feet built per year Which is not really speed. Just how “much” you’re building, on average per year Right?
- nashashmi 4y ago
  It is a sequential problem. The second floor is only happening after the first floor.
- majormajor 4y ago
  Throughput per year is a valid definition of "speed" in certain contexts; e.g. "if you wanted to add X square footage of new skyscraping housing in a city, which city could get it done fastest." The thing that it tries to capture vs "linear time to build a single building" is parallelization capacity. Having one expert contractor who built a tower fast, but no capability to build 20 towers at the same time, won't get it done. The analysis should probably require more samples or data cleanup though. Just from quick inspection of the city at the top of the list: "The fastest city out of any examined is, somehow, Los Angeles, though random variation may be the cause (it only has five skyscrapers in the database)." - doesn't fit with the article's own criteria of "every skyscraper completed between 2000-2020 that was taller than 100 meters, had a start and completion date, and had a gross floor area" because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_Los_Angeles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_L... this list shows many more than 5.
bitL 4y ago
I think there is a typo, Shenzhen went from 88,000 (not 880,000) in 1985 to 11M in 2015.
pianoben 4y ago
Wow, the before-and-after pictures of some Asian cities (Shenzhen, Singapore, Hong Kong) are arresting. Hong Kong in 1967 looks so idyllic and clean! The pollution in the "now" photo is heartbreaking.
m3kw9 4y ago
Maybe avg days per 100sqft is more indicative. His metric is biased towards countries with more skyscrapers developments.
inasio 4y ago
The numbers don't make sense to me. LA at the top at around 445,000 sqft per year is equivalent to a gross floor area given by a square of sides 667 feet, or ~66 meters. It's probably off by like three orders of magnitude
- inconceivable 4y ago
  lol do you actually live in LA to witness the towers going up everywhere over the last 10-15 years? also, 3 orders of magnitude is 100% -> 10% -> 1% -> .1% of reported numbers.
  - inasio 4y ago
    The other way around, to me this means that the total floor space is the size of a 66 meter square, which is ridiculously small. I think it must have been at least 1000X times that
    - jeeeb 4y ago
      I assume the numbers are normalised for the number of buildings, otherwise the comparison would be meaningless.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  "Average construction speed of skyscrapers completed in 2000 and 2020, in square feet per year" While a bit unclear I take that to mean it's presenting the construction speed of individual skyscrapers and giving the measurements in square feet per year then averaging those rates by presented location. In this measurement a 200x200 square foot floor building with 20 stories would be 800k square feet, if it took 4 years to complete that would factor in as 200k/square feet per year in the city average, not as +200k/square feet per year to the bar. Looking at the graphs it seems a building with 4,000,000 square feet doesn't take much longer than a building with 400,000 square feet: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6a900dbe-165e-4c5b-ba38-6a9768fdd27b_509x322.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... and there are a lot more smaller ones to weigh down the speed.
DeathArrow 4y ago
I wonder which cities are building the most sustainable environments the fastest, which cities are more livable. While certainly skyscrapers are an engineering feat, I don't want to live in a city dominated by skyscrapers. I want to live in a city built for humans.
endisneigh 4y ago
Given that LA is much larger by area, these results probably need to be normalized in some way.
- majormajor 4y ago
  You should check out the area of Beijing and the other Chinese cities on the list. Or even Tokyo.
tobinfekkes 4y ago
Manchester, UK is likely missed on this list because it's not one of the "largest" cities in the world. But if we're just looking at skyscrapers added in the last 20 years, one thinks it should be included. The before and after of the skyline since 2000 is similar to those Asian cities (not quite the scale obviously, but similar in almost being unrecognizable).
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  I thought British are smarter than this and they enjoy country side and seeing a bit of nature.
maelito 4y ago
Glad to see France is still not in this list.
DeathArrow 4y ago
Living at floor 185 as opposed to floor 0 does not improve the quality of life. Humans need space both inside and outside, and they need sun exposure and some contact with nature to feel well. Living only between concrete, steel and glass takes its toll on the well-being.
- pzone 4y ago
  Living in the middle of a dense city does improve quality of life for many people via access to amenities and jobs with a very short commute. A hypothetical 50 story skyscraper can provide these benefits to 50 times as many people as a single story building could. You're right that light and sky visibility are finite resources that require more land. 100+ story buildings can feel oppressive to people. The question to ask then is why we allocate so little land to mid-rise development and force it all into Manhattan and small downtowns. That's the biggest reason we have such tall buildings there.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    > Living in the middle of a dense city does improve quality of life for many people. Do you have citations? Arguably, skyscrapers don't mean a dense city but a mega dense city. So how is your life better if you live in a 20 million city VS a 2 million city?
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  100 acres of parkland and one acre of skyscraper is a much better way to meet those needs than 101 acres of suburbs.
wsetchell 4y ago
I wonder if there's a way to factor in planning time needed. My perception is that the US requires years of (e.g. environmental) reviews before construction can begin which countries like China do not have.
- wsetchell 4y ago
  It'd also be really interesting to a similar view on cost per square foot. The US is probably expensive from high labour + land costs, but it might more even expensive than those would suggest.
DeathArrow 4y ago
This race to the top is in fact the race to the bottom when livability and quality of life is concerned.
SeanLuke 4y ago
Hong Kong has very special circumstances which makes it quite different from other cities in this respect, including other asian cities. IIRC its building codes require skyscrapers to be about twice as dense and reinforced as other cities in order to easily withstand cyclones (hurricanes). Cyclones often tear through the Philippines, killing many, and then ram into HK, which barely notices. Furthermore, much of Hong Kong is mountainous, and so its skyscrapers are often built on unusual and very, very steep grades -- sometimes steeper than the steepest stuff in SF. OR they are built on reclaimed land with its own special issues. Last, Hong Kong proper is by many measures the densest city in the world, and that includes Manhattan. Building a skyscraper often involves destroying another one.
Kon-Peki 4y ago
"Construction speed" really feels like the wrong phrase to use. Maybe "pace of construction"? I'm not sure. The thing to understand is that in all the large cities all over the world, there are multiple construction crews working concurrently on individual projects. "Construction speed" feels like it would be describing a single crew working on a single project. In addition, there are plenty of internet communities where people track construction projects, and if you read through those you'll see that there are a lot of variables that influence how quickly a skyscraper can be built. The soil plays a large role - how stable, what material, how close is bedrock, etc. The foundation of a skyscraper is extremely complicated and expensive, and the time it takes to construct is hyper-specific to the location. Just one example.
Someone 4y ago
IMO, this article confuses building speed with production rate. A city that takes a month to build a skyscraper will be ranked lower than one that takes three months to build one if the former has one build going up at any time, completing 12 in a year, and the latter always builds 4 in parallel, completing 16 in a year. A hypothetical city that builds a complete skyscraper in a day and doesn’t build any the remainder of the year would score way lower than either. If we assume a global market for building crews (which, I think but correct me if I’m wrong, is somewhat true. Specialists are willing to move around to get to work on big projects) and little shortage in tooling or materials, those numbers reflect demand, not at which rate they can build.
londons_explore 4y ago
You know what gets things built quickly... High interest rates!

55 points by jseliger 4y ago

Once again you can see the absolute mediocrity of Canada seeping through. In every single metric they are the worst out of the developed countries.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

scythe 4y ago

Los Angeles?! He clarifies that it's probably due to a low sample size. But still... LA? It seems like the "surprising" success of the US might be due to skyscrapers being largely built by the private sector, which is pretty good in the US, while American public sector construction is, unfortunately, something of a running joke. Good on him for recognizing the mistake (autocorrelation) in a previous article.

milleramp 4y ago
I guessed that Los Angeles would be high on the list, not necessarily first, the amount of construction in downtown has been crazy the last decades. The skyline is so different compared to the 90's.
xxpor 4y ago
I can't think of a large scale public construction project recently, in any domain. Everything's contracted out. In Seattle for example you see the exact same contractors building stuff for Google and Sound Transit.
- paramount 4y ago
  Speaking of Seattle, the 99 tunnel was pretty large in scope with the world's largest tunnel boring machine. Construction started in 2013 and opened to traffic in 2019. "Boring of the tunnel with the 57.5-foot (17.5 m) diameter "Bertha," at the time the world's largest-diameter tunnel-boring machine, began on July 30, 2013,[69][70] and at the time was expected to be completed in 14 months" [1] We also have the lightrail projects with total funding of over $54 billion. Pretty large in scope with variability in success and budget[2] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Route_99_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Route_99_tunnel [2]https://www.constructiondive.com/news/seattle-area-light-rail-transportation-plan-busting-54b-budget/549892/ https://www.constructiondive.com/news/seattle-area-light-rai...
  - com2kid 4y ago
    > Pretty large in scope with variability in success and budget[2] Sound Transit would have better luck if they weren't forced to work under so many constraints. Because money trickles in slowly, and because funding has to come from different cities in a predetermined way, they are stuck with speculators buying up property before Sound Transit is allowed to, and then selling it to ST for inflated prices. Cities that need mass transit right now are not allowed to pay for transit to be built faster in their area. And of course everyone loves to sue them, costing even more $. I still have not figured out why the holy hell there isn't commercial real estate built along with all sound transit stations. We have these large expensive stations that are devoid of any commercial activity, meanwhile Japan sticks Michelin Star restaurants in their transit stations. The Roosevelt station is a notable example of this, huge station, takes up lots of the block, and it is tall, why aren't there at least 2 or even 3 levels of retail space in it?
    - scythe 4y ago
      >I still have not figured out why the holy hell there isn't commercial real estate built along with all sound transit stations. We have these large expensive stations that are devoid of any commercial activity, meanwhile Japan sticks Michelin Star restaurants in their transit stations. In general, the opposite complaint has been raised: US station platforms are too large! I don't know how they do it in Japan, but the train station in Rome has all of the services above ground in a normal building, away from the tracks, while when I've seen coffeeshops and the like at subways in the US, they're often on the platform or at least underground. DC has some truly cavernous stations full of a lot of signs and stale air (and not much else). So it seems like part of the problem is that the subway authority is confined to an unreasonably tight definition of where they can operate, and then they try to cram a camel through the eye of the needle.
- scythe 4y ago
  Contractors are probably part of the problem: https://slate.com/business/2023/02/subway-costs-us-europe-public-transit-funds.html https://slate.com/business/2023/02/subway-costs-us-europe-pu... Public agencies don't have enough in-house expertise, so they spend more on contractors and consultants than in peer nations (particularly vs. non-Anglosphere). So I'm sorry if it was confusing when I said "public sector", because the problem occurs with public infrastructure projects directed by the government, and the privatization downstream has minimal effect.
jmclnx 4y ago
Yes, I agree with this, if a public building probably takes 10x 20x slower. My city was rather fast too, but we still have one bridge Under Construction since 1986 :) They just said it will be replaced any day now
RC_ITR 4y ago
My guess is also that it has a lot to do with infrastructure. This is probably why US tall buildings are slower than the rest of world. When a new tower requires metro station access, complex/new electrical work, etc. the US lags because those things take a lot of civic interaction. Meanwhile, LA's midrise towers have almost no new infrastructure requirements and can just start rising.
- scythe 4y ago
  US tall buildings are not slower than the rest of the world. That's the biggest surprise in the data, and it persists under different analytical methodologies.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    > If we look only at the very tallest buildings, China builds much faster than the US. ??
wolverine876 4y ago
Do you have data on the public vs private sector rates? Running jokes are not evidence (except of groupthink).
- scythe 4y ago
  It's very difficult to put a direct comparison, because the government usually does not build skyscrapers, and the private sector almost never builds public transit. But you see dramatic shortfalls in US cost and rate on the construction of major transit infrastructure compared to peer nations: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-america https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/22534714/rail-roads-infrast... As I detail in a cousin comment, privatizing the construction process itself does not help (and might make matters worse), but it surprised both the author (of TFA) and me to see that the US is competitive when the whole project is privatized — possibly implying that the government is making mistakes in administration particularly.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    Maybe the government takes on tasks that private sector companies don't believe they can make work.
    - scythe 4y ago
      It's not impossible. But again, the contrast has four parts: - Eurasian private sector, works - Anglosphere private sector, works (except in Canada) - Eurasian public sector, works - Anglosphere public sector, confounded by cost overruns If it's a simple result of scope, it remains to be explained why similar projects are harder in the English-speaking world than in Italy, China, Japan or Mexico (yes, even Mexico has substantially lower costs!). My other comments in this thread offer more details.

tromp 4y ago

I had expected to see Dubai there, but apparently, they're too slow to make the charts. Neom's The Line should easily top the charts if (BIG IF!) it gets realized in the next few decades. 170kmx200m area of skyscraper quickly adds up sq ft...

runnerup 4y ago
The Line is a scam. Not sure exactly who is being scammed vs. doing the scam but it’s delusional and will never amount to anything. It’s not an “if”, it’s just not real.
- notahacker 4y ago
  I've heard it generally suggested that it's the Crown Prince scamming himself. He wants the massive monument to himself and headlines about all its fantastic new ideas, he has the money to bankroll it, and consultants will happily take large multiples of their usual fee to agree with his ideas.
kspacewalk2 4y ago
> 170kmx200m area of skyscraper Not really an if. This will never get built.

photochemsyn 4y ago

I'm not sure that construction speed is the metric you want to optimize when it comes to skyscraper construction, although I suppose robustness is built-in to all the designs these days. A quick search for robust skyscraper design turns up this interesting effect-of-9/11 discussion: https://www.dezeen.com/2021/09/07/911-anniversary-skyscrapers-design/ https://www.dezeen.com/2021/09/07/911-anniversary-skyscraper... Skyscrapers also have a footprint that might no be immediately obvious - it's their energy, water and food demand. Assuming they're inhabited by humans, what's the amount of agricultural land needed to provide for those humans? What's the energy demand, how many modular 100 MW nuclear power plants or hectares of solar PV panels (plus associated 24/7 storage/distribution centers) are needed to keep the elevator, lights, pumps, ventilation and heating/AC functioning? How much water do they consume daily? That's the kind of 'skyscraper footprint analysis' that architects should be asked to submit for any building design.

kredd 4y ago
Pardon my general ignorance in this topic, but it’s those energy, water and food demand would still be applicable no matter where people live, no? The denser the population, easier to deliver said things (something alike economy of scale). Unless i’m missing something?
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  Well, the two extremes would be an even distribution of small homes over the entire agricultural footprint space for the human population, vs. all the humans living in a giant skyscraper surrounded by the agricultural (and energy, and water) production zone. Each setup has certain advantages and disadvantages (transport from field -> skyscraper has a cost, vs. local availability of basic resources, but on the other hand, if you have to run fiber optic to every household, that gets expensive). In terms of delivery, it depends on lot on the mass of what's being delivered. If we want to go larger, then imagine multiple installations like this, perhaps specializing in different production capabilities, and trading among one another. Sort of a Factorio gameplay scenario. Basically, would skyscrapers (or underground versions) be the best way to colonize Mars (you'd still need the large agricultural zones)? See also Mad Max: Fury Road for the dystopian version (BulletFarm, GasTown, and Hydroponics/Milk IIRC). Back on Earth, the issue would be that if you doubled the population density of a city by building a lot of skyscrapers without also doubling the regional agricultural zone size, you'd end up dependent on import of foodstuffs from remote regions, which could become a problem.

chollida1 4y ago

I'm surprised Toronto was so low. I've read reports that for 3 years in a row the city has had the most active construction cranes of any north American city. I guess it could be that alot of Toronto's buildings don't hit the sky scraper designation?

InitialLastName 4y ago
Wouldn't that statistic hold if Toronto were building the normal number of skyscrapers, but were particularly slow about it? If a city starts 1 building/year and buildings take 5 years to build, the steady-state average will be 5 simultaneous active construction sites. On the other hand, if it takes 10 years to build a building, there will be 10 simultaneous active sites.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  The more likely explanation is that the author has excluded everything less than 100 meters in height. That's somewhere between 30 and 35 floors. You'll be using a "permanent" construction crane for anything greater than 10 or 12 floors - a lot of buildings that use a crane are simply not being counted. FYI - in high-rise construction, the foundation is designed to have a space for the construction crane. It is anchored to the foundation at the beginning of the project and removed at the end. IE, for the duration of the project the crane is part of the building. Shorter buildings will have a "portable" crane, even if it is on-site for a long period of time.
arecurrence 4y ago
I scrolled through and didn't see anywhere that they defined what "complete" meant. It could be as simple as Canada counts a skyscraper as completed when the first residents move in versus perhaps America counts it as completed when the roof is done. This may initially sound dumb... but it can mean a lot "legally speaking". My understanding is Canada and America have very similar building codes and construction plans. Indeed, many of these construction companies are multinational.

rossdavidh 4y ago

I suspect that, because so much of the time required is either political or organizational, the part that's left (which would be expected to go up with increasing size) is not actually enough to make a very big correlation between size of building and time to complete. Which means "builds skyscrapers the fastest" actually means something more like "builds the biggest skyscrapers".

wolverine876 4y ago

I'd like someone with expertise to analyze this data. Often blunt data like what's in this article can mislead outsiders. For example, how is the start defined? Maybe that's a technicality, depending on local permitting laws. Maybe post-construction legal or regulatory issues are involved. Maybe it's tied to weather or the ground. I'm just making up possilities - the point is, I have no idea myself.

antipaul 4y ago

Is the metric right? It’s not how quickly you can get a tower up It’s average speed of square feet built per year Which is not really speed. Just how “much” you’re building, on average per year Right?

nashashmi 4y ago
It is a sequential problem. The second floor is only happening after the first floor.
majormajor 4y ago
Throughput per year is a valid definition of "speed" in certain contexts; e.g. "if you wanted to add X square footage of new skyscraping housing in a city, which city could get it done fastest." The thing that it tries to capture vs "linear time to build a single building" is parallelization capacity. Having one expert contractor who built a tower fast, but no capability to build 20 towers at the same time, won't get it done. The analysis should probably require more samples or data cleanup though. Just from quick inspection of the city at the top of the list: "The fastest city out of any examined is, somehow, Los Angeles, though random variation may be the cause (it only has five skyscrapers in the database)." - doesn't fit with the article's own criteria of "every skyscraper completed between 2000-2020 that was taller than 100 meters, had a start and completion date, and had a gross floor area" because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_Los_Angeles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_L... this list shows many more than 5.

bitL 4y ago

I think there is a typo, Shenzhen went from 88,000 (not 880,000) in 1985 to 11M in 2015.

pianoben 4y ago

Wow, the before-and-after pictures of some Asian cities (Shenzhen, Singapore, Hong Kong) are arresting. Hong Kong in 1967 looks so idyllic and clean! The pollution in the "now" photo is heartbreaking.

m3kw9 4y ago

Maybe avg days per 100sqft is more indicative. His metric is biased towards countries with more skyscrapers developments.

inasio 4y ago

The numbers don't make sense to me. LA at the top at around 445,000 sqft per year is equivalent to a gross floor area given by a square of sides 667 feet, or ~66 meters. It's probably off by like three orders of magnitude

inconceivable 4y ago
lol do you actually live in LA to witness the towers going up everywhere over the last 10-15 years? also, 3 orders of magnitude is 100% -> 10% -> 1% -> .1% of reported numbers.
- inasio 4y ago
  The other way around, to me this means that the total floor space is the size of a 66 meter square, which is ridiculously small. I think it must have been at least 1000X times that
  - jeeeb 4y ago
    I assume the numbers are normalised for the number of buildings, otherwise the comparison would be meaningless.
zamadatix 4y ago
"Average construction speed of skyscrapers completed in 2000 and 2020, in square feet per year" While a bit unclear I take that to mean it's presenting the construction speed of individual skyscrapers and giving the measurements in square feet per year then averaging those rates by presented location. In this measurement a 200x200 square foot floor building with 20 stories would be 800k square feet, if it took 4 years to complete that would factor in as 200k/square feet per year in the city average, not as +200k/square feet per year to the bar. Looking at the graphs it seems a building with 4,000,000 square feet doesn't take much longer than a building with 400,000 square feet: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6a900dbe-165e-4c5b-ba38-6a9768fdd27b_509x322.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... and there are a lot more smaller ones to weigh down the speed.

DeathArrow 4y ago

I wonder which cities are building the most sustainable environments the fastest, which cities are more livable. While certainly skyscrapers are an engineering feat, I don't want to live in a city dominated by skyscrapers. I want to live in a city built for humans.

endisneigh 4y ago

Given that LA is much larger by area, these results probably need to be normalized in some way.

majormajor 4y ago
You should check out the area of Beijing and the other Chinese cities on the list. Or even Tokyo.

tobinfekkes 4y ago

Manchester, UK is likely missed on this list because it's not one of the "largest" cities in the world. But if we're just looking at skyscrapers added in the last 20 years, one thinks it should be included. The before and after of the skyline since 2000 is similar to those Asian cities (not quite the scale obviously, but similar in almost being unrecognizable).

DeathArrow 4y ago
I thought British are smarter than this and they enjoy country side and seeing a bit of nature.

maelito 4y ago

Glad to see France is still not in this list.

DeathArrow 4y ago

Living at floor 185 as opposed to floor 0 does not improve the quality of life. Humans need space both inside and outside, and they need sun exposure and some contact with nature to feel well. Living only between concrete, steel and glass takes its toll on the well-being.

pzone 4y ago
Living in the middle of a dense city does improve quality of life for many people via access to amenities and jobs with a very short commute. A hypothetical 50 story skyscraper can provide these benefits to 50 times as many people as a single story building could. You're right that light and sky visibility are finite resources that require more land. 100+ story buildings can feel oppressive to people. The question to ask then is why we allocate so little land to mid-rise development and force it all into Manhattan and small downtowns. That's the biggest reason we have such tall buildings there.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  > Living in the middle of a dense city does improve quality of life for many people. Do you have citations? Arguably, skyscrapers don't mean a dense city but a mega dense city. So how is your life better if you live in a 20 million city VS a 2 million city?
bryanlarsen 4y ago
100 acres of parkland and one acre of skyscraper is a much better way to meet those needs than 101 acres of suburbs.

wsetchell 4y ago

I wonder if there's a way to factor in planning time needed. My perception is that the US requires years of (e.g. environmental) reviews before construction can begin which countries like China do not have.

wsetchell 4y ago
It'd also be really interesting to a similar view on cost per square foot. The US is probably expensive from high labour + land costs, but it might more even expensive than those would suggest.

DeathArrow 4y ago

This race to the top is in fact the race to the bottom when livability and quality of life is concerned.

SeanLuke 4y ago

Hong Kong has very special circumstances which makes it quite different from other cities in this respect, including other asian cities. IIRC its building codes require skyscrapers to be about twice as dense and reinforced as other cities in order to easily withstand cyclones (hurricanes). Cyclones often tear through the Philippines, killing many, and then ram into HK, which barely notices. Furthermore, much of Hong Kong is mountainous, and so its skyscrapers are often built on unusual and very, very steep grades -- sometimes steeper than the steepest stuff in SF. OR they are built on reclaimed land with its own special issues. Last, Hong Kong proper is by many measures the densest city in the world, and that includes Manhattan. Building a skyscraper often involves destroying another one.

Kon-Peki 4y ago

"Construction speed" really feels like the wrong phrase to use. Maybe "pace of construction"? I'm not sure. The thing to understand is that in all the large cities all over the world, there are multiple construction crews working concurrently on individual projects. "Construction speed" feels like it would be describing a single crew working on a single project. In addition, there are plenty of internet communities where people track construction projects, and if you read through those you'll see that there are a lot of variables that influence how quickly a skyscraper can be built. The soil plays a large role - how stable, what material, how close is bedrock, etc. The foundation of a skyscraper is extremely complicated and expensive, and the time it takes to construct is hyper-specific to the location. Just one example.

Someone 4y ago

IMO, this article confuses building speed with production rate. A city that takes a month to build a skyscraper will be ranked lower than one that takes three months to build one if the former has one build going up at any time, completing 12 in a year, and the latter always builds 4 in parallel, completing 16 in a year. A hypothetical city that builds a complete skyscraper in a day and doesn’t build any the remainder of the year would score way lower than either. If we assume a global market for building crews (which, I think but correct me if I’m wrong, is somewhat true. Specialists are willing to move around to get to work on big projects) and little shortage in tooling or materials, those numbers reflect demand, not at which rate they can build.

londons_explore 4y ago

You know what gets things built quickly... High interest rates!