Are “landscrapers” the new skyscrapers?
work.qz.com
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I get the complaints about having to travel by elevator all the time and not having as much ground level community. Which is why I don't understand why sky-ways never became popular. There's no technological reason you couldn't have an interconnected upper level with shops and public/commercial space. Perhaps its just a problem on getting all the different developers and governments to agree on the standards for a modular interconnected second level.
Edit: For anyone who hasn’t spent time in the twin cities, the skyways are public transit.
Apple's new campus for example is basically a landscraper.
Apple's lot in Cupertino is approximately 2400 ft by 3400 ft (although it's trapezoidal, not rectangular). For comparison, that's roughly the entirety of downtown Providence. Or, superimposed on Manhattan's grid, 9 streets by 4 avenues. It's roughly the dimensions of the elevated loop tracks in Chicago.
The Empire State Building occupies 1 street by ½ avenue. Sears Tower is on a lot about 450 ft square (one slot in the Chicago grid system). You just simply can't acquire the land in cities that you would need to build landscrapers.
Except, the OP case is London, which has some of the most expensive real-estate prices on the planet.
Not that I disagree with your overall point, just this final statement doesn't ring true.
Let me check the bottom of my purse. Just a little bit short (measured in decimal places, about 8 of them).
TLDR: this landscraper is Google's way of storing/investing it's offshore cash, at it's heart it's a tax dodge (funny how it isn't mentioned in Mr. Khan's comments that a LOT of companies in London are in fact there purely as a tax dodge).
I'm not commenting about London in particular. Maybe a landscraper in London doesn't make sense. I don't know. But landscrapers do make sense in other places.
Except when real-estate prices aren't high, you're usually super far away from industry and population... the things that drive up real-estate prices.
If proximity to related companies wasn't important, why does Silicon Valley or Hollywood even exist instead of a peppering of low-cost buildings across the midwest? We already know the answer.
Companies like Amazon can afford to "create" new hotspots and ship engineers there. Literal tiny towns with a gigantic new data center that can attract "support" business like new restaurants. But for most companies, there's a benefit to being around other companies. (e.g. My software company buys hardware and services hard drive failures from an IT company across the street.) And what happens when you have lots of companies around? The competition for space drives prices up. And what happens when so many companies want that space? The buildings start moving upward into the sky.
It's simple economics. Land is valuable. Especially in tiny overpopulated places like England and many EU states. This should not be surprising or new knowledge.
It's like saying a metro carries more people faster, so they're better than roads. They're better only where the density justifies their construction. Likewise, skyscrapers are better only in some situations.
India is also overpopulated, with a population density of 382 people per sq km vs the world average of 51, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to build skyscrapers everywhere in India.
This means that if they simply occupied all the land and went up for 5 floors they'd have more floor space.
Example, the Pentagon in the U.S., with 5 floors and 6.5 million square feet has more usable square footage than the Burj, the tallest building in the world.
The Pentagon is interesting as a building because it was put up very quickly and remains one of the largest buildings by usable square footage in the world. But of course it's not a raw optimization. There's a 5+ acre center courtyard that's non-structural and each part of the pentagon is composed of 5 concentric "rings" with space between them for natural light to get into the building. Despite this, it's still a more efficient use of land acreage vs. the Burj.
And buildings have a height limit. With brick, it was the point where the bottom storey had walls so thick, it became a pedestal of brick. So making them taller than 20 stories or so got you no more space.
With steel construction, its elevators. The point where the bottom storey was entirely made up of elevator banks, and making it taller gets you no more interior space. The Twin Towers were there. The Sears (Willits) Tower is there.
We have these in downtown Cedar Rapids. Its awful.
It looks like every other mid-rise commercial building development.
Is it the future? Absolutely, if by future, you mean the 80's, but everything is shiny and labeled with the adjective "smart" for some reason.
Almost as innovative as Apple's relabelling of the suburban office/business park.
When the hell did everything become marketing...
https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/18/3889818/google-relocates-...
Asia, unburdened by the West's ridiculous land policies, is skyscraper heaven.
These buildings are by no means sprawling office parks. They are simply the realization that horizontal may be better than vertical in some cases.
How are these "landscrapers" different from sprawling office parks? The key difference I notice is that the plan doesn't include an ocean of parking (which admittedly is a big part of why office parks are terrible).
Part of what makes old-school cities so pedestrian friendly was having a variety of small shops to stop in. A bakery, grocer, butcher, clothing store all only a few windows wide. This is like building an enormous Home Depot, Costco and Circuit City in the middle of downtown. This does not make a pedestrian friendly city.
Eurasia is a "landscraper" (oriented longitudinally) allowing for easier trade and exchange of innovations (especially related to agriculture and animal domestication) along a broad expanse of land.
The Americas are a skyscraper (more latitudinal orientation) with greater diversity of climate and topology that impeded the spread of some innovations and technologies.
I think the floor argument is oversold: what matters is proximity, and particularly the aptitude to congregate in common areas (such as water fountains). Once you're talking about choosing between a 15-story 1 block building versus a 5-story 3 block building, you're already big enough that you've lost proximity and common area congregation, so it doesn't really matter that much either way.
You build skyscrapers in locations where ground is scarce and expensive, you build landscapers in locations where it is the opposite. In dense areas with high ground prices you accept the building cost overhead, in other areas you go for cheaper building costs and accept the increased price on land (as compared to a skyscraper at the same location).
- Does not look anything like a cruise landlocked cruise ship.
The U.S. Government used to build office buildings a few stories high but huge in length. The Pentagon is the most notable example, but there were many others built in the 1940s through the 1960s. They were built sturdily and cheaply, like parking garages.
It seems like that might knock you over, but maybe there's a fun workaround (or just seats I guess).
"Future employees might move around landscrapers on elevators that zoom back and forth laterally, not only up and down, she notes. That technology already exists in Germany, where ThyssenKrupp has recently sold the first elevator that can move up, down, sideways and diagonally—controlled by magnetic levitation—to a residential building in Berlin."
Somewhere I saw a prototype of a multi-belt system as well. You get on a shorter one at normal speed, and you can either transition to one moving twice as fast as the first, or you can step off completely. The speed difference from stationary to slow is the same as from slow to fast - you just accelerate by shifting belts.
We need better than this, especially early on, in order to have thoughtful conversation.
I don't understand your question.