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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

Do we know what lead to skyscrapers being built? Intuitively I'd think economic prosperity and density. However, Europe has a pretty good economy, is more densely populated than many other regions, yet hardly any skyscrapers to speak of. Do they maybe get built when you need lots of space in the same location quickly? Like when you have a extreme high growth company. Given most skyscrapers are used by several completely different business, that doesn't fit the bill either.

This is not meant as a criticism of skyscrapers. In have I LOVE skyscrapers, especially ones with nice bars on top. I just want to understand what circumstances lead to them being built.

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I think it's a cultural thing. A lot of people in europe think skyscrapers destroy the skylines of cities. They really dislike any changes though. For example, in Stockholm, there was a fire recently in a rather ugly building (where they educate architects!!). Rather than tearing it down and building something better looking than that sh*thole eye sore of a building they are just repairing it.

This is the building I'm talking about: https://www.google.se/maps/@59.3433863,18.0697072,3a,75y,309...

The Azrieli School of Architecture building at Carleton University in Ottawa is a bizarre building that a lot of Architect students have their courses in. The legend on campus is that the building was designed purposely to be filled with architectural flaws so that students would learn from them. I have no idea if it's true, but it certainly would explain a lot.

Perhaps your architect's school has a similar idea in mind. Because seriously, that is a dull looking building.

I can see how it could be good to make future architects suffer bad architecture along their way.

Architecture schools always seem to be ugly for some reason. The one at Berkeley[0] is hideous. Legend has it that it was build to look "inside-out" so the students could have a better understanding of how buildings are built.

[0] https://ced.berkeley.edu/images/made/images/uploads/features...

There was a discussion on that in the New Yorker that sadly I failed to save (it was pre-evernote in my life). But as I recall you are essentially correct in your guess. The calculus was the value of leasing all of the space would return $x, the cost of the land was $y and the cost to build was a function of height. You simply solve for the most money returned.

In San Francisco the cost, with the earth quake requirements, seems to go up fairly quickly and it is hard to get anything approved by the city.

Additionally the geography must be able to support sky scrapers. In some places solid stable bedrock is hundreds to thousand+ feet down. This also makes it impractical to build structures beyond a certain height in such areas.

1. Face/prestige, having a modern skyline conveys internally as externally that china is modern and prosperous.

2. Jobs, these skyscrapers employ lots of people, especially migrant workers, preventing them from becoming idle and dangerous.

3. On paper, land is very expensive in these cities, so making the most of it by building up can make sense.

Demand for A grade office space isn’t that strong, so it can be hard to fill these buildings up without some discounts. Likewise, if you want to stay on the 99th floor at some of the hotels that top these buildings, they are quite affordable. I stayed at the IFC in Guangzhou in 2016, it was around $250/night, and the view was absolutely astounding from such a high floor!

In the US (Chicago), the invention of the elevator led to progressively taller buildings. Today, elevator technology is still one of the limiting factors of how tall you can build.

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