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Comment by IIAOPSW | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a silly use of real estate. The entire point of building an n-story building is you get to multiply your usable land area by n. Those who point to tall down-towns are right. A built up city has more land area than the map would suggest and can thus fit more people and more activity. Even better is the fact that a single utility link (electric, gas, sewage) to an n-floor building does the same work as n links to n 1-floor buildings. Its just more efficient.

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.

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One of the problems with tall buildings, especially super-tall ones, is the amount of interior that gets eaten up by non-usable infrastructure and support. For example, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai occupies about 17 acres (just under 7 hectares), while offering about 3.6 million square feet of interior floor space (about 83 acres or about 33.5 hectares) for a ratio of space:footprint that's < 5.

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.

Burj Khalifa is not a utilitarian building, and clearly an outlier, so I don't really see why you would use it as an example except to mislead people. The Empire State Building which was mentioned in the article has 2.7 million square feet of office space built on 80k square feet of land.

It's an optimization problem. As buildings get taller and taller more and more of the interior space gets taken up by support framework, transportation and utility service bits. The Burj Khalifa is notable because it's also a case where in order to construct a building of its height, the shape of the supporting infrastructure of the building is also fundamentally compromised such that there's less usable interior per unit height.

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.

I tend to agree with the comments about height, but re: skyways - they're just kind of weird. They're not public spaces, so they can be exclusionary. And the vibe is just kind of weird. Downtown Atlanta below the skyways is already eerily quiet for a major city, but within them... I don't know, I have a constant feeling that I'm trespassing even though I'm not. Does anyone else get this feeling?

In downtown Minneapolis the feeling I get is, “It’s -20° out there I don’t care if I’m allowed to be up here or not.”

Edit: For anyone who hasn’t spent time in the twin cities, the skyways are public transit.

Skyways suck - tall building real estate is at a premium, and now there's a freeway through your cubicle.

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.

Could make more sense when connecting already public spaces. Let's say vertically built shopping malls directly connected to some big metro/train station. From there you could reach your premium office spaces farther away from the station. There must be some sort of gateway/junction point which would be public but other than that office space could remain off limits. I doubt you'd have random people walking through your cubicle.

To connect a grid of buildings, multiple skyways. So there must be a 'freeway' through each building, for traffic passing through. Using up valuable floor space, chopping the floor into pieces, noise outside your office. Not good however you do it.

We have these in downtown Cedar Rapids. Its awful.

Matter of taste, I believe... For me this public floor wouldn't be a waste. You could have boutiques, newspapers stand, florist or cafe, you name it, similarly to ground floors. When you have 50 floors "wasting" one or two for the connection shouldn't be a big deal. Of course everything boils down to how well is it designed and implemented and how many people actually uses it. In my place there are skyways between big department stores. Only two and not that spectacular but it works nice, is convenient, doesn't spoil overall architecture. I'd gladly see more such solutions in future.

Hah, interesting. I'll make a detour through Cedar Rapids next time I'm in the area to check them out - the disadvantages are far from obvious.

Further you need a map to figure out where to go next. The locals all know, but to the uninitiated its a maze. So you get confused folks wandering into the wrong places all the time.

Skyscrapers are viable in only a few areas. Cost increases as you build up. Landscrapers make sense where real-estate prices aren't so high.

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.

>Landscrapers make sense where real-estate prices aren't so high.

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.

You missed my point, which isn't that skyscrapers shouldn't exist but that they're not viable everywhere, and so saying "skyscrapers are a better use of real estate than landscrapers" is too simplistic.

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.

skyscrapers are mostly about making a statement....there are very few places in the world where land is truly so expensive that absolutely everyone, even the wealthiest corporations in the world, must build up.

Apple's new campus for example is basically a landscraper.

Lot size is a major factor. In many cities, the block sizes are just way too small to support sprawled campuses.

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.

> 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.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/18/3889818/google-relocates-...

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).

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