The Form Could Be Reborn: The Future of the Skyscraper
medium.com
medium.com
No, it really, really, has not.
> But more than that, Facebook, along with all the start-up successes of Silicon Valley, has also disrupted paradigms of success and power.
Huh, seriously? Who makes this stuff up?! Maybe the author should get out of SV every once in a while to see that in the rest of the world, the concepts of "success" and "power" have not changed in the last 10 years.
Are you saying that the nature of friendship some sort of absolute that is unaffected by changes in the structure of peoples' day? Like email, facebook is a new medium for friendship, with a multitude of new methods of communication. For example, the like button is a new way to acknowledge in a highly neutral manner. I "like" the cat picture, I also "like" how someone said that they have cancer. Mechanisms like "like" are fundamentally changing the nature of the relationships established and maintained, and it is having an effect outside of that new medium.
Success and power have also changed. Before twitter and facebook in the late 90s and early 00s, do you think that the centralized mass media or the widespread use of email made people successful or famous in the same way? The brain structures are the same, but the culture has changed along with the environment.
Perhaps she wants us to understand that because the same can be said for architecture. The effect of architecture on daily life is far greater IMO. Modernist and international style buildings completely changed what happened at the street level and wiped out entire societies that existed. Only now are mixed use buildings attempting to restore street-level normalcy, except that it will be different. This is because, like facebook that improves upon email, the medium is different than it was in traditional pre-modernist architecture.
If the function is not the first consideration of the architect, well, then they are not really doing their job. So we want to start building more skyscrapers again, we need to show their physical utility. Perhaps change the way people move in such space. That is a grand challenge for, wait for it, some architect.
It's actually illegal to build skyscrapers in SV (see, e.g., here: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... although one could cite many further articles on the subject). FB can't build skyscrapers (or even in many cases mid-rises) because local municipalities won't let it.
Once upon a time one could actually impress people by building skyscrapers, but that time is over. Now we all know that it is possible, the novelty wore off.
And the argument about saving resources: There are only very few places in the world where space is at a premium.
I wonder what Christopher Alexander would say about that article - while his "Timeless Way of Building" did resonate with me because it was all about "humans first", this article is just the other way around.
Sure, but while you're at the office/at work/in your apartment? Does it matter so much whether your building is 2 or 40 stories? You get back on the street for your lunch break either way. The author is not against building parks and recreational spaces where you can have this; I don't really understand your complaint.
> Once upon a time one could actually impress people by building skyscrapers, but that time is over. Now we all know that it is possible, the novelty wore off.
I obviously can't change your opinion here, but there's something very satisfying about looking out from a high floor on a tall building. There's always something satisfying to me about driving towards NYC and seeing the skyline in the distance. Maybe I'm just holding on a little too much to modernist aesthetics, but I agree with the author that skyscrapers can still impress.
For a more recent example, I took a trip to London a few weeks ago. The piece of art I saw there that most affected me wasn't a painting, but a skyscraper: I saw The Shard* (completed 2012), rising up into the clouds and mist. I found it incredibly powerful to gaze up at a building like that. It's an experience I have difficulty describing -- it felt like a quasi-religious monument to some aspect of our contemporary culture, and it affected me as such.
> There are only very few places in the world where space is at a premium
And those are also the areas where people want to live. People like other people. People, in general, like density. Why keep them playgrounds for the international wealthy? Cities used to be places for everyone: immigrants, travelers, artists, businesspeople, parents & children... There are more people now than ever: let's build to the sky.
Yes, I actually like being woken up by birds or seeing an actual tree when I look out of my office window. I don't want to commute to a "recreational space" and I enjoy having meetings in cafes just outside, sitting in the sun, having a coffee. If you walk in between skyscrapers, you have about one hour per day of direct sunlight.
> there's something very satisfying about looking out from a high floor on a tall building
Only when your view is not blocked by another just as tall building across the street.
> [The Shard]
I can appreciate nice architecture. But I lived in London for some time and I also enjoyed the low-rise architecture that still makes up most of the inner city. The only thing that, after some time, annoyed me: Always seeing the Gherkin (which, as far as I know, is not even profitable). The picture on WP illustrates that pretty well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_St_Mary_Axe
> [The places where space is at a premium] are also the areas where people want to live.
And here one should ask what made those places so desirable in the first place. Would San Francisco still be hip without the parks and cafes but with skyscraper next to skyscraper? I would doubt that.
What tall buildings give you of course is easier mass transit since you get better economies making a few stations which can serve a million, rather than a lot of stations that serve only thousands.
[1] Total office inventory in the South Bay/San Jose market area amounted to 106,215,509 square feet in 4,417 buildings as of the end of the second quarter 2009. -- Pg 12, https://www.sanjoseca.gov/DocumentCenter/View/1623
[2] 142,809,572 (table 1) -- http://www.thesquarefoot.com/blog/posts/manhattan-q3-2013-of...
The city of Seattle released an updated report for 2013 data on their mandated city wide energy benchmarking. http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/OSE/EBR-2013-re... I would suggest that these results may not translate well to the rest of the world, Seattle's climate is so mild it's a bit of an outlier.
Based on the data collected, mid-rise housing has a lower Energy Use intensity (EUI) than high rise housing, see page 33. Figure 22 on page 51 is also interesting because it looks like the high rise multifamily also has a lower variance than the mid-family. To me that implies there is less room for design improvement, more of the buildings are grouped around the median higher EUI. EUI is the annual energy use per area of building, typically kBtu per square foot in the states.
I found these results somewhat counter-intuitive from an Mechanical/Energy Engineer point of view until I thought about it a bit. Ideally a tall dense building has less exterior area per interior area and hence lower heat loss/gain, but in reality skyscrapers tend to have substantially more glazing(windows) than mid rise and the energy load impact of windows is substantially greater than opaque walls, say R-5 to R-20.
Also, a high rise provides the opportunity for sophisticated mechanical systems with energy recovery and efficient systems, but in reality sophisticated systems are complicated, often poorly implemented and difficult to maintain leading to excessive energy consumption.
Everything can always be designed better in the future, but I would suggest the data doesn't necessarily support that the density skyscrapers bring improves their environmental impact. Granted I'm not taking into account any of the external factors like reduced commutes, transit density, infrastructure density, etc.
- main street social conditions that can exist at the 10th...nth floor, ideally connecting buildings together
- trees, gardens, connections to nature
- fostering more flexible construction of office and housing space
- allowing for new forms of mass transport and automated delivery