4 ms·

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 a

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.
  - feoren 4y ago
    I don't think we exist somewhere on the line directly between your two extremes; I think there are more dimensions than that. It's true that for most of human history, the local availability of basic resources meant not having to transport lots of goods around. But that's just not modern society: even in resource-rich rural areas, the vast majority of goods on store shelves are from far, far away. If you want local stores to stock oranges all year, and smartphones, and plastic toys, resources are going to be moving thousands of miles no matter where humans live. Density ultimately just means fewer destinations for those goods, which can allow for optimization. High-density living is just more optimal in almost every way.
    - freshpots 4y ago
      See my comment above. The basics, water, power, and sewage are a challenge in modern society when it comes to growth.
- freshpots 4y ago
  Yes, but is the power grid capable of such demand? Sewer and water pipes? Thinking with the perspective of, how do we service this land for growth/people changes one's perspective. People often think...look at all this empty land, it can hold so many people... but, where will they get their power (which can relatively easily be transmitted long distances). Water and sewage are another challenge. Water of a sufficient quality and quantity needs to come from somewhere and be treated, sewage needs to be conveyed to a treatment plant, treated, and discharged to, generally, a river or lake. So much infrastructure is needed for modern society, especially density, that is often not thought about by most. For example, I was at a gas station on a highway where there are no cities nearby and another customer asked if there were any car washes. I thought about it for a minute and realized that there's no sewage treatment around so there's nowhere to send car wash water. They could store it and truck it but that would be quite expensive. Thanks for coming to my shower thoughts TEDx talk.
  - feoren 4y ago
    > Water and sewage are another challenge. Water of a sufficient quality and quantity needs to come from somewhere and be treated, sewage needs to be conveyed to a treatment plant, treated, and discharged to, generally, a river or lake. So much infrastructure is needed for modern society, especially density, that is often not thought about by most. All of these problems are easier with higher density, not harder. Would you rather run and maintain a few giant sewer lines for a million people, or thousands of small sewer lines over hundreds of miles? Sewage treatment plants benefit enormously from economies of scale. Economies of scale and lower transportation costs make higher-density living more economical in nearly every way.
    - thfuran 4y ago
      >All of these problems are easier with higher density, not harder. Would you rather run and maintain a few giant sewer lines for a million people, or thousands of small sewer lines over hundreds of miles? But that's not really the problem faced with construction, except when building on previously undeveloped land. Significant increase in density imposes commentate additional demand on existing infrastructure, which is much harder to expand than to operate and quite probably vastly harder to expand than it would've been to build initially to that expanded state before there was a dense city on top of it.
dullcrisp 4y ago
Presumably those humans are going to have to eat food whether they live in a skyscraper or not though?
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  I think because you can easily photograph a meadow that's now a metropolis, but you cannot photograph an area that hundreds of square miles of meadows and forest and now covered in sprawl, humans instinctively think city = bad, sprawl with two trees = good. It's hard to understand somehow that the trade-off is between ruin a giant area or totally ruin (even that's subjective) a much, much smaller area.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    Agricultural production is pretty ruinous to the native biota, although this can be mitigated by introducing patchiness. Farms are kill zones, in other words - you have to kill the insects and rodents which would otherwise devour the crops intended for the humans in the skyscrapers. A lot of people (vegans ahem) seem to not understand this (although it is true that if you're eating the crops directly, and avoiding the losses involved in feeding the crops to animals and then eating the animals, you can subsist on a smaller agricultural footprint).
    - ajmurmann 4y ago
      Short of suicide, is there a way to reduce the footprint caused by food consumption lower than from a vegan diet? It seems to me that eating meet always will consume more land and other resources, no?
      - photochemsyn 4y ago
        Well, 'vegan' is a broad concept. Clearly there are certain plants which are hard to grow and which produce minimal foodstuffs per acre, strawberries and almonds probably fall into that category (comparable to dairy, certainly) and in grassland ecosystems, it might be less of a footprint to live off meat and milk from herded animals rather than trying to implement crop agriculture. Reindeer herders in Siberia, for example, are probably more in tune with their environment than any vegan cultivator in that zone could be.
unyttigfjelltol 4y ago
> Interestingly enough, the huge outlier in slow construction isn't the US, but Canada, with an average skyscraper construction speed of half that of the US’s. A building materials professor I knew years ago talked often about how robust Canadian skyscrapers were, and how many pre-9/11 U.S. designs never would have been approved there. I suspect differences in local building robustness code play a role in how much square footage makes it into skyscrapers in a locality, and how quickly.
chimeracoder 4y ago
> 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? Yes, that is a footprint, and it's almost universally much lower than any other form of housing. Modern construction is very efficient, and it's much more environmentally friendly to consolidate these concerns than to spread it out. > That's the kind of 'skyscraper footprint analysis' that architects should be asked to submit for any building design. What you're proposing is really just another way to block construction, NIMBY-style. Nobody asks for these proposals when building tract housing. Why should it be any different for shared housing? It's not like the amount of food and water people need varies based on where they live.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > Nobody asks for these proposals when building tract housing. Of course they do. In my area we require any proposed development to include a detailed independent analysis (not a few pages, it's an inch thick book) of all the infrastructure requirements to support that development as well as the predictable downstream effects, and so on. Maybe that's not universal. Maybe it's why my suburban area hasn't experienced any of the infrastructure failure predicted by places like strong towns despite well over 100 years and counting. But I expect that it is more common than not. If you're only talking about "how much food land somewhere in the world do we need to support X people here or somewhere else" then sure, I guess nobody probably does that. Regardless of housing style. It's not very useful, unless we're planning some dystopian population controls and are looking for justification.
  - chimeracoder 4y ago
    > If you're only talking about "how much food land somewhere in the world do we need to support X people here or somewhere else" then sure, I guess nobody probably does that. Yes, that's what I'm talking about. Environmental analysis of the other form is commonplace, but varies by locality. In some places, the environmental review process is already weaponized in order to block construction with absurd claims, purely for self-serving purposes.
ajmurmann 4y ago
> 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. We should either require this for all buildings or for none. People are gonna have to live and work somewhere. Typically the foot print of lower-density solutions in all ways you describe will be even bigger. If we think a sustainability assessment on all new construction will help, that can be a reasonable argument. I caution though that all the friction in getting new construction approved is a big factor in our growing housing cost. So let's make sure any regulation truly carries it's weight.
- simplotek 4y ago
  > We should either require this for all buildings or for none. You do understand that "requiring this for all buildings" has a name: urban planning. This sort of analysis is basically what engineers do when assessing the environmental impact.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
0xDEF 4y ago
>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? All of that is much more efficient in high-rise buildings than anywhere else. The same with cities vs. rural/suburban areas. The former is much more energy efficient and has a smaller carbon footprint.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  Carbon footprint depends on energy sources, not population density. 100,000 humans supplied with coal-fired electricity have a radically different carbon footprint from the same populations supplied with solar PV and wind electricity, and it doesn't matter whether they live in isolated households or in one skyscraper.
  - feoren 4y ago
    > Carbon footprint depends on energy sources, Obviously true. > Carbon footprint [does not depend on] population density. Patently false. Carbon footprint can depend on more than one variable, and indeed does. Transportation of goods and people is a huge source of carbon, all of which goes way down in cities. > it doesn't matter whether they live in isolated households or in one skyscraper. It's much easier to heat every room in a skyscraper than isolated households due to volume vs. surface-area scaling, even if you hold square footage equal. But square footage is not equal; people occupy less space in skyscrapers, because of redundancy in amenities (shared garages, laundry, recreational areas) and other reasons.
    - photochemsyn 4y ago
      Again 'transportation of goods and people' is only a huge source of carbon if your transportation system relies on fossil fuels. You're not grasping the argument, I don't know why.
screye 4y ago
> Skyscrapers also have a footprint that might no be immediately obvious - it's their energy, water and food demand I am not sure I understand. Wouldn't all these statistics amount to roughly equal or lower consumption as compared to options that house a similar number of people ? Skyscraper resource consumption = domestic resource consumption per capita + overhead The domestic resource consumption is constant. The overhead is actually lower. Centralized heating is cheaper than individual heating. Lighting a bunch of corridors is cheaper than lighting an entire street of single family housing. Water consumption is also lower when the green spaces are communal (green rooftop) vs individual yards.

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.
- feoren 4y ago
  I don't think we exist somewhere on the line directly between your two extremes; I think there are more dimensions than that. It's true that for most of human history, the local availability of basic resources meant not having to transport lots of goods around. But that's just not modern society: even in resource-rich rural areas, the vast majority of goods on store shelves are from far, far away. If you want local stores to stock oranges all year, and smartphones, and plastic toys, resources are going to be moving thousands of miles no matter where humans live. Density ultimately just means fewer destinations for those goods, which can allow for optimization. High-density living is just more optimal in almost every way.
  - freshpots 4y ago
    See my comment above. The basics, water, power, and sewage are a challenge in modern society when it comes to growth.
freshpots 4y ago
Yes, but is the power grid capable of such demand? Sewer and water pipes? Thinking with the perspective of, how do we service this land for growth/people changes one's perspective. People often think...look at all this empty land, it can hold so many people... but, where will they get their power (which can relatively easily be transmitted long distances). Water and sewage are another challenge. Water of a sufficient quality and quantity needs to come from somewhere and be treated, sewage needs to be conveyed to a treatment plant, treated, and discharged to, generally, a river or lake. So much infrastructure is needed for modern society, especially density, that is often not thought about by most. For example, I was at a gas station on a highway where there are no cities nearby and another customer asked if there were any car washes. I thought about it for a minute and realized that there's no sewage treatment around so there's nowhere to send car wash water. They could store it and truck it but that would be quite expensive. Thanks for coming to my shower thoughts TEDx talk.
- feoren 4y ago
  > Water and sewage are another challenge. Water of a sufficient quality and quantity needs to come from somewhere and be treated, sewage needs to be conveyed to a treatment plant, treated, and discharged to, generally, a river or lake. So much infrastructure is needed for modern society, especially density, that is often not thought about by most. All of these problems are easier with higher density, not harder. Would you rather run and maintain a few giant sewer lines for a million people, or thousands of small sewer lines over hundreds of miles? Sewage treatment plants benefit enormously from economies of scale. Economies of scale and lower transportation costs make higher-density living more economical in nearly every way.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    >All of these problems are easier with higher density, not harder. Would you rather run and maintain a few giant sewer lines for a million people, or thousands of small sewer lines over hundreds of miles? But that's not really the problem faced with construction, except when building on previously undeveloped land. Significant increase in density imposes commentate additional demand on existing infrastructure, which is much harder to expand than to operate and quite probably vastly harder to expand than it would've been to build initially to that expanded state before there was a dense city on top of it.

dullcrisp 4y ago

Presumably those humans are going to have to eat food whether they live in a skyscraper or not though?

ajmurmann 4y ago
I think because you can easily photograph a meadow that's now a metropolis, but you cannot photograph an area that hundreds of square miles of meadows and forest and now covered in sprawl, humans instinctively think city = bad, sprawl with two trees = good. It's hard to understand somehow that the trade-off is between ruin a giant area or totally ruin (even that's subjective) a much, much smaller area.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  Agricultural production is pretty ruinous to the native biota, although this can be mitigated by introducing patchiness. Farms are kill zones, in other words - you have to kill the insects and rodents which would otherwise devour the crops intended for the humans in the skyscrapers. A lot of people (vegans ahem) seem to not understand this (although it is true that if you're eating the crops directly, and avoiding the losses involved in feeding the crops to animals and then eating the animals, you can subsist on a smaller agricultural footprint).
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    Short of suicide, is there a way to reduce the footprint caused by food consumption lower than from a vegan diet? It seems to me that eating meet always will consume more land and other resources, no?
    - photochemsyn 4y ago
      Well, 'vegan' is a broad concept. Clearly there are certain plants which are hard to grow and which produce minimal foodstuffs per acre, strawberries and almonds probably fall into that category (comparable to dairy, certainly) and in grassland ecosystems, it might be less of a footprint to live off meat and milk from herded animals rather than trying to implement crop agriculture. Reindeer herders in Siberia, for example, are probably more in tune with their environment than any vegan cultivator in that zone could be.

unyttigfjelltol 4y ago

> Interestingly enough, the huge outlier in slow construction isn't the US, but Canada, with an average skyscraper construction speed of half that of the US’s. A building materials professor I knew years ago talked often about how robust Canadian skyscrapers were, and how many pre-9/11 U.S. designs never would have been approved there. I suspect differences in local building robustness code play a role in how much square footage makes it into skyscrapers in a locality, and how quickly.

chimeracoder 4y ago

> 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? Yes, that is a footprint, and it's almost universally much lower than any other form of housing. Modern construction is very efficient, and it's much more environmentally friendly to consolidate these concerns than to spread it out. > That's the kind of 'skyscraper footprint analysis' that architects should be asked to submit for any building design. What you're proposing is really just another way to block construction, NIMBY-style. Nobody asks for these proposals when building tract housing. Why should it be any different for shared housing? It's not like the amount of food and water people need varies based on where they live.

rootusrootus 4y ago
> Nobody asks for these proposals when building tract housing. Of course they do. In my area we require any proposed development to include a detailed independent analysis (not a few pages, it's an inch thick book) of all the infrastructure requirements to support that development as well as the predictable downstream effects, and so on. Maybe that's not universal. Maybe it's why my suburban area hasn't experienced any of the infrastructure failure predicted by places like strong towns despite well over 100 years and counting. But I expect that it is more common than not. If you're only talking about "how much food land somewhere in the world do we need to support X people here or somewhere else" then sure, I guess nobody probably does that. Regardless of housing style. It's not very useful, unless we're planning some dystopian population controls and are looking for justification.
- chimeracoder 4y ago
  > If you're only talking about "how much food land somewhere in the world do we need to support X people here or somewhere else" then sure, I guess nobody probably does that. Yes, that's what I'm talking about. Environmental analysis of the other form is commonplace, but varies by locality. In some places, the environmental review process is already weaponized in order to block construction with absurd claims, purely for self-serving purposes.

ajmurmann 4y ago

> 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. We should either require this for all buildings or for none. People are gonna have to live and work somewhere. Typically the foot print of lower-density solutions in all ways you describe will be even bigger. If we think a sustainability assessment on all new construction will help, that can be a reasonable argument. I caution though that all the friction in getting new construction approved is a big factor in our growing housing cost. So let's make sure any regulation truly carries it's weight.

simplotek 4y ago
> We should either require this for all buildings or for none. You do understand that "requiring this for all buildings" has a name: urban planning. This sort of analysis is basically what engineers do when assessing the environmental impact.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

0xDEF 4y ago

photochemsyn 4y ago
Carbon footprint depends on energy sources, not population density. 100,000 humans supplied with coal-fired electricity have a radically different carbon footprint from the same populations supplied with solar PV and wind electricity, and it doesn't matter whether they live in isolated households or in one skyscraper.
- feoren 4y ago
  > Carbon footprint depends on energy sources, Obviously true. > Carbon footprint [does not depend on] population density. Patently false. Carbon footprint can depend on more than one variable, and indeed does. Transportation of goods and people is a huge source of carbon, all of which goes way down in cities. > it doesn't matter whether they live in isolated households or in one skyscraper. It's much easier to heat every room in a skyscraper than isolated households due to volume vs. surface-area scaling, even if you hold square footage equal. But square footage is not equal; people occupy less space in skyscrapers, because of redundancy in amenities (shared garages, laundry, recreational areas) and other reasons.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    Again 'transportation of goods and people' is only a huge source of carbon if your transportation system relies on fossil fuels. You're not grasping the argument, I don't know why.

screye 4y ago

> Skyscrapers also have a footprint that might no be immediately obvious - it's their energy, water and food demand I am not sure I understand. Wouldn't all these statistics amount to roughly equal or lower consumption as compared to options that house a similar number of people ? Skyscraper resource consumption = domestic resource consumption per capita + overhead The domestic resource consumption is constant. The overhead is actually lower. Centralized heating is cheaper than individual heating. Lighting a bunch of corridors is cheaper than lighting an entire street of single family housing. Water consumption is also lower when the green spaces are communal (green rooftop) vs individual yards.