Tall Buildings of the Last Fifty Years | Hacker News Reader

Tall Buildings of the Last Fifty Years

ctbuh2019.com

CTBUH have an interesting set of skyscraper data[0] that's worth perusing, if you are willing to register (or block certain elements..)

Also, interesting piece of trivia: the voluntary demolition of buildings taller than 200m is unprecedented.[1][2] The first of these buildings to be built was the Metropolitan Life Tower,[3] completed in 1909, which is still standing today.

[0]: https://www.skyscrapercenter.com/

[1]: 9/11 and the destruction of the WTC towers being the implied involuntary demolition.

[2]: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/praising-squareness-...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Life_Insurance_Co...

> voluntary demolition of buildings taller than 200m is unprecedented

Any insight into why is it so?

Do you normally destroy things worth millions of dollars that still can do their basic function (house offices)?

Well office buildings get torn down routinely; I would expect there to be a separate reason why 200m+ ones are not.

The higher/bigger the building, the bigger you need to replace it with, thus it's a much bigger investment, than finding a lot with a smaller building on it.

As a sibling post a bit up mentioned JP Morgan's 270 Park Av. building 215m and it's getting replaced, because in this case it wasn't easier to "just find a lot with a smaller building", which is probably very rare and rather recent (though once there were multi-storey buildings in place of every skyscraper in Manhattan) solution.

270 Park Avenue (215 m), the headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, is currently being demolished to build a new headquarters building about twice as tall.

> The design strategy of the Leadenhall Building centers around its lobby’s elevation above the ground plane, creating a

... three storey climb up the fire escape from the basement if you arrive by bicycle!

Architects love this building, but there are too many little facepalms that come with actually working in it.

Shouldn't there be an elevator?

I'm sure there is an elevator, but you typically want to avoid elevators when escaping a fire.

The main lifts don't reach the basement because of the elevated lobby nonsense. There is one small lift which does go down there, but it's a service lift for the whole building, so it could be busy elsewhere when you want it.

My pass won't operate it anyway; you have to be specially authorized, and when I asked, our office manager didn't know how to do that.

This reminds me of my days living in Simmons Hall at MIT.

Architects loved the building. Groups of architects would come at weird hours and try to sneak into the building to see the inside.

It had a good number of functional issues that came from the “innovative” architecture. For example, the walls in some of the small rooms were curved — this made very inefficient use of the space and furniture. Another issue was the constant water leaks from the oddly intersecting glass window panels. The seals were hard to maintain and the leaks were hard to track.

> At the time of their completion [1973], the Twin Towers —the original 1 World Trade Center, at 1,368 feet (417 m); and 2 World Trade Center, at 1,362 feet (415.1 m)—were the tallest buildings in the world.

It seems odd that there's no overt mention.

The ones listed seem to have something novel about them, like a new method of construction or a unique design.

Was there anything like that for the WTC, or was it "just" tallest?

They weren’t even the tallest for very long because the Sears Tower was completed in 1973.

From HowStuffWorks:[0]

> The design of the Twin Towers is often called a "tube within a tube," referring to the fact that all of the weight of the building was supported by the external walls and an internal column. Previously, the exterior walls of a skyscraper were called curtain walls -- they weren't relied upon for strength, so it wasn't imperative that super-sturdy materials were used for them.

And from 9-11 Research:[1]

> The system of design of the World Trade Center Towers is called tubular framing, since the perimeter frames of the building are designed to act as a cantilevered tube in resisting lateral forces. This design concept (the so-called tube within a tube architecture) has been employed in the construction of many of the world's tallest buildings. These include the John Hancock Center (1105 ft), the Standard Oil of Indiana Building (1125 ft) and the Sears Tower (1450 ft).

I wouldn't rely on much else in that site, though.

0) https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/wor...

1) https://www.911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/guardian2/wtc/nova....

The framed-tube structure of the original Twin Towers was pretty novel at the time. It allowed the building to have wide open floor plans without the need to have a grid of support beams everywhere like most other skyscrapers up until then. It also likely would not have collapsed if built the traditional way. Then again most modern skyscrapers are built more like the original WTC and less like the Empire State Building, so it's not really a design flaw.

The visual design of the towers was also striking in it's minimalism, and quite controversial too. I think people got used to them but after they were first opened many saw them as a blight on the skyline. IMO, I prefer the old towers to the new, not that the new one is particularly ugly or anything. They were kinda like the Pyramids of skyscrapers; just build a shape, as big and tall as you can. Maybe if 9/11 never happened a future civilization would have called them "The Rectangles".

The post mentions both the John Hancock Center and Sears Tower already used similar structures.

The 208' square floorplan resulted in a slender monolith. With other construction methods, they may have toppled, rather than collapsed within the tube. That may have resulted in even more death and destruction.

The development of the World Trade Center destroyed "Radio Row". Possibly more of the electronics industry would have stayed in the New York area had than not happened. "The Death of New York's Radio Row" https://www.qcwa.org/radio-row.htm

> The 208' square floorplan resulted in a slender monolith. With other construction methods, they may have toppled, rather than collapsed within the tube. That may have resulted in even more death and destruction.

I guess we'll never know, so I'm just theory crafting, but the structure above impact on the South Tower did topple to a pretty extreme angle before falling straight down:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/07/3d/04/073d041d28159fc6f376...

I suppose for a concrete grid structure like Empire State Building, it might have slid off and fell to the ground without collapsing the structure below. Not really sure if that would be any worse, or better.

The only way to get it to topple like you'd expect a tree would when chopped down is for the airplane impact to be much lower on the structure. That would not have been possible of course because of all the other buildings in the way, but it was I believe the intention of the 1993 WTC bombing.

Interesting photo, thanks. I was thinking that the top would buckle at the point of impact and fall sideways.

Compared with the B-25 collision with the Empire State Building, the B-767s are over 10 times heavier, were moving more than twice as fast, and the WTC has half the cross section of the Empire State. Plus, the fuel load of the 767s is comparably greater and causes a greater fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_Empire_State_Building_B-2...

There was nothing nice about the WTC twin towers. They were impressive for their height but the architecture wasn't so much brutalist, but stark utiltarian with about as much warmth as a multi-level carpark.

Buildings like the Gherkin or 1 Bligh St are airy and spacious on the inside due to their innovative architecture. Bligh St being completely hollow similar to the Lloyds Building in London and the Gherkin's 5deg plate rotation creating vertical breezeways within the building.

https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/VikramBengani/the-gherkin-...

Did you ever see the WTC in person? I found that it had a surprising number of sensitive human-scale details. Didn't read as such from afar, but up close it was no less humane than the Gherkin.

I was thinking about that too, but they were architected, and construction started, more than 50 years ago. So they just barely missed this list.

Yeah, that's probably it. I was counting from completion date.

Really enjoyed this. Another interesting building is this hotel in North Korea: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel

I guess it doesn't get much attention due to its location...

I suspect the author(s) limited the selections to completed, occupied buildings, as that hotel is "the tallest unoccupied building in the world". If buildings in progress were on the list, I would have also expected to see Jedda Tower. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeddah_Tower

One side is plastered with LCD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7SFTm7IebU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8N7GXQ48Lo

absolutely mental

Great to see 1 Bligh St, Sydney in the list. It's a fantastic building on the inside with the central attrium going right to the roof.

While a lot of people seem to hate it, I actually like 1 William St in Brisbane.

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