Why skyscrapers are so short
worksinprogress.co
worksinprogress.co
The low hanging fruit exists in the general lack of this mid-rise range of buildings in many places. Above six or ten stories, it's actually counterproductive in terms of things like energy efficiency.
Many good cities, like Paris, limit skyscrapers by policy on purpose because it's not actually the best human environment. Good urban environments involve a lot of mid-rise buildings clusters together, not a lot of skyscrapers.
that Roman residential buildings (insulae) maxed out at around 7 or 8 storeys, with 5 or 6 storeys being more common.
One of the reasons for that is that apartment buildings could not include kitchens. Cooking tech was based on using fire to cook and you couldn't build a multi story building with kitchens in every unit because you couldn't put fireplaces in the units.
Poor people in Roman cities bought prepared meals from street vendors. They didn't cook at home.
Buildings are primarily about meeting human needs. This article seems to fail to adequately understand the ways in which human habitation and human use drive such things far more than physics, technology and similar.
I am not sure I'd give up a car for anything less than Manhattan subway (multiple redundant grade-separated tracks, that go everywhere you need, every 2-3 minutes) and you aren't getting public transit that good on just duplexes.
Anyway, all this to say, public transportation gets pretty light past a certain distance from city center, and you most definitely needed a car if you want to have some sort of life outside commuting. Admittedly, we're 17 years past that time, but from what I've heard from a friend still living there, it's still the very same situation.
I often have to park my car streets away because all the closer spots are taken. But it doesn't matter as much because we don't use it much.
Car sharing systems are the next step, our car is old so the economics don't quite work yet. But when it breaks down we won't buy a new one, just sign up for one of the services that have cars parked nearby.
¿Por qué no los dos? Skyscrapers for the highly productive business downtown where they can actually bring increased density compared to mid-rise buildings, and mid-rises for the rest of the city. You're right that skyscrapers are not "the best human environment" in any general sense; they're an adaptive response to very special conditions, that are generally not found outside the places where skyscrapers are common.
That's why not both in my opinion as someone actively trying to support healthy development of smaller towns that have often been left behind in the US in recent decades. There has been longstanding trend of people moving to big cities because that's where the jobs are, so we emphasize creating better infrastructure in big cities and further densifying big cities, make for a vicious cycle.
If we had more mid-rise density in smaller towns, we could have more thriving small towns and we wouldn't have to choose between overpriced, overly dense big cities or safe, small cheap and boring small towns that lack jobs, lack amenities etc.
We could have decent quality of life for more people generally.
Well I am. And I think such trends do a great deal of harm to the American social fabric.
Way more people would move to big cities if it was affordable, and these people's wishes should be supported.
Almost by definition, this is true, as if everyone did not want to move to the city, then prices would be lower.
This romanticism for making everyone live in small towns is not something that most people support, given that way more people would leave small towns if they could.
This is likely true. And yet people bitch plenty about how homeless folks are interfering with their enjoyment of the good life in the downtown areas of big cities.
In practical terms you get to pick one. You can care about nebulous concepts like the social fabric and have less feces, discarded needles and the like or you can not care and see people moving out of cities like San Francisco because they are going to hell as all the poor people ruin it for the upper classes who still don't care about those people but hate stepping over the mess.
> In practical terms you get to pick one. You can care about nebulous concepts like the social fabric
Actually there was the other solution. The other solution compared to yours of "make people live in the small towns.", is instead "Make lots of tall skyscapers, so that big cities are affordable".
If we lower the costs of big cities (By making lots and lots of supply, including tall skyscapers), then prices are lower for those who need them, and more people can live here, and take advantage of the big cities, and it can also benefit the poor by actually making it possible for them to live here, instead of on the streets.
We don't have to force out the poor from the big cities. Instead we can make the big cities affordable to live in, with lots and lots of tall skyscrapers.
> see people moving out of cities like San Francisco
Actually, you are the one who is trying to get people to move out of the big cities. I want there to be more supply for everyone, in these big cities, with more skyscapers.
I know a lot about homelessness. I spent nearly six years homeless and before that had a college class through SFSU called Homelessness and Public Policy and I still run several blogs on the topic, though I update them less than I used to as my focus has shifted to trying to solve the housing shortage that is a root cause of homelessness in the US.
Yes it will. Think of a skyscaper like a Yuppie containment center. For every high end apartment that exists, a Yuppie is no longer filling up an apartment in the mission, that very well could be afforable if they weren't currently full of yuppies.
There are lots of yuppies who would love to live in those skyscapers, and if we build more of them, then those people will no longer be taking away afforable housing from other people who need it.
Also, historically, this is how housing has worked. Previously high end apartments, become low end, over time, as the rich move out of those places, into other, newer apartments.
> Skyscrapers are inherently expensive to build
Doesn't matter. Because the goal is to get wealthy individuals, out of the existing apartments. The poor aren't forced to live in those skyscapers, but if the skyscapers exist, then there is less competition for the lower end of the market.
It still will not make big cities and skyscrapers in specific affordable for the types of people who end up homeless.
Having been homeless and spoken to many homeless and so forth, I think we need some housing stock below $600/month in rent that will take households of up to three people. Skyscrapers are unlikely to be a means to provide housing at that price point, though they can be found sometimes in older low to mid-rise buildings.
More skyscrapers may make downtowns more affordable for more middle class types who are currently forced out to the suburbs. They are unlikely to serve the types of people at high risk of homelessness, either directly or indirectly.
There comes a point past which you simply can't lower the rent any further if your carrying costs are simply too high.
The biggest problem with housing in big cities is that there isn't enough of it. When that is the case, the most important thing is putting more in. Even if the housing you put in is expensive, as long as it is dense, it will lower housing prices for other places because there is less competition.
At least one study suggests that four-story buildings are the sweet spot for minimizing energy usage. Though some people speculate that additional research will find that optimal height for minimizing carbon footprint will prove to be in the 6- to 12-story range, there is general agreement that very tall buildings are an energy burden to be avoided if we want to get climate change under control.
http://projectsro.blogspot.com/2021/02/copenhagens-first-sky...
The study in question:
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/getting-buildin...
One of the things that is part of my mental model is that poor people are frequently people with serious health problems and our built environment is part of what fosters that.
I'm dirt poor and not at my best tonight because of that. This late in the month I'm often broke as is the case currently. It's a very stressful way to live and it compounds problems.
I have lived without a car for more than a decade which is challenging in the US. Our built environment requires a lot of Americans to own a car so they can get to work and get groceries and what not. We make it very difficult to make your life work without a car.
We also have an obesity epidemic which means a lot of people suffering from preventable health problems. That epidemic is rooted in our built environment and the fact that it's so hard to walk anywhere.
It's also hard to walk anywhere because of pollution and extremes of weather rooted in climate change. In my mind, all these things are very clearly tied together.
But it's always challenging to express that effectively, more so when I am in poor health and dirt poor and can't seem to solve that.
The poorest people in the US are people like me. And I have gotten off a bunch of prescription drugs in part by living without a car for a lot of years. But I get openly attacked and dismissed anytime I try to talk about that. I get told I'm making that up and a liar and yadda.
I am not for building more skyscrapers, certainly not for what the article in question advocates of making them even taller.
The myriad problems the US has are rooted in our not human scaled, not human friendly built environment. This includes issues like poor air quality, lack of opportunity to get exercise as a consequence of running errands on foot and many other issues.
I think it's probably time for me to step away from this discussion. I don't know how to keep having it and comply with unstated expectations that my welfare is not important, my experiences are not real and cannot be expressed etc. That's not something I can politely deal with at the moment.
If there are more skyscrapers, then the yuppies will not live in those 600$ a month housing, and that housing will be available for the people who need it.
Thats the point.
All those low income housing that you want, will no longer be filled with yuppies who would otherwise gentrify an area.
If you read this post, people specifically quote or address the idea, of yuppies no longer living in those cheaping housing, because they are no in the skyscapers, and therefore the lower priced housing is available to others.
Because you have ignored or dodged this idea, like 3 times now.
Not they allow it in the west due to health/fire concerns, but the sub basements of apartment blocks in China have been converted into very cheap rooms for rent. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_tribe
One reason that you don’t have so many homeless in China is that the bottom on housing standards is a lot lower. Again, something that we can’t really replicate in the west.
It will make the former places, that those yuppies were gentrifying, more affordable. Because for every skyscraper apartment, that is filled with a yuppy, that is one less house in the mission, being gentrified by a yuppie, which is now available for someone else to live there.
> for more middle class types
Then those middle income types will no longer be living in some other place, that is now available for someone of lower income.
It frees up their former place that they were living before, for a lower income resident.
It would be like a Morlock/Eloi situation, except that we'll all be Morlocks. They'll do the missile defense systems and the smartphone OS's, and I'll grow the corn and mine the rare earth minerals. We can all even adopt a bicameral government, one that governs areas of population density above a certain value and one that governs areas below a certain value.
It was a story where the subtext was "And after you rich assholes have become helplessly dependent on your servants, the servants will take over the world and eat the rich because you people are becoming sheeple."
I have difficulty seeing any world where the goal is Morlocks and Eloi as some kind of positive thing to shoot for as a goal. Personally, I would like to see a world where fewer people have reason to bitterly suggest that we should eat the rich.
So, funnily enough, this is actually a similar argument that I often make. I believe it benefits everyone, if yuppies like myself, get what we want with Tokyo megacities, so that we don't cause all these problems with the rest of society, with our high income, driving up prices of everything around us.
Someone who described this very well, was noahpinion. He called this strategy, the Yuppie Containment Protocol. Society creates "Gentrification Containment Units", so that we the Yuppies don't cause this horrible harm, of extra income and wealth, hurting everyone else.
Us yuppies, bringing in demand for gentrified coffee shops, fancy skyscapers, and upscale restaurants drives out existing residents. It is better to just give us a couple megacities somewhere, so our horrible terrible income and wealth, and willingness to spend it on the economy doesn't hurt those gentrification vulnerable people.
Perhaps high-earning, artisanal baristas who specialize in getting the most out of perfectly-roasted-that-morning civet-excrement-extracted coffee beans? While I also advocate ultra-high-density (Tokyo is a piker compared to #1 density Manila) cities, I freely admit that rentier dynamics in those settings in capitalist contexts remains an unsatisfactorily-addressed problem, and service workers get hit especially hard.
Well since there is now all this extra living space in other places that is freed up, because all the high earners don't live in other places, then I guess it would only be people who actually want to live in that area or work these jobs.
If nobody wants these jobs, because cost of living is high in those areas, then wages would have to increase to attract people who want to work there.
People would not be forced to live there, because of all those extra empty homes in other cities, that the yuppies moved out of.
That's the other weird assumption. My tiny-ass hometown has rents on par with San Francisco right now, because there are apparently enough high-earners who can now work remotely and want to live in a little mountain town.
Yes, I am sure you can find a couple people, who would move from a more expensive location, but that is a silly thing to bring up, as some counter example, when there are a lot more places that are cheaper, which people could move from.
So yes, it is a very reasonable assumption, to say that if someone moves to SF, that most of those people, are moving out of cheaper cost of living areas, because that is how stats work.
And anyway, maybe those mountain towns would be cheaper, if those yuppies were living in SF instead. So both points support me, even in the case of a yuppie coming from an expensive mountain town, moving to SF.
Especially since the sort of jobs that are starting to move to be location-independent pay better than the sort of low level in-person work that keeps a town or city running.
Developing urban centers to hold more people definitely frees up space in non-urban areas, but it's not a yuppie vs low class thing. There will always be rich people who want country living, and a working class who enjoy (and are necessary to support) city life.
Great. So you agree completely with my main point here, and your only disagreements seems to be semantic or irrelevant to that main point.
As long as you agree with the statement you that just made, then I can confidently say you have zero, or at least very little disagreement with what I was intending on communicating.
stale2002 perfectly makes the point you've been advocating for throughout the thread.
To me social fabric in this context of decaying small towns has a negative connotation that in my mind it reads as a reversion to white, sis, straight, nuclear families as the idea of what America is. And it's used that way by political campaigns as well to play on fears, racism, and us/them to win votes.
Non-hispanic white is only 57% right now and declining. a ton of cities are white minority - kind of to the point about this picture of past american rural ideals are out of date.
Out LGTBQ is somewhere approaching 5% across all generations. Key word out.
Gen Z are ~15% out. I wouldn't be surprised if the true non-cis/non-straight % is closer to 20%.
So that probably puts cis white in the slight minority and shrinking.
And I'm not sure what 'passes' means I will try to use HN rule of benefit of the doubt
* Lots of cars
* Reduce overall population
* A powerful government that controls a lot and does city planning
* A religion system to make people "do things for the greater good"
you may not what any of them either.
You can propose other solutions as well, feel free.
Sure, but who cares? Air conditioning is counterproductive for energy efficiency too. We have it anyway because the whole point of air conditioning is to spend energy making ourselves better off. If we want to, we can also spend energy making ourselves better off via skyscrapers.
Businesses that would otherwise be scattered around the city giving their employees a chance to live near them are concentrated in a small region core.
Its a traffic double whammy. No one lives near and they have to drive to the same small footprint.
Its far better to have mix use six-eight story buildings.
These seem like nearly ideal conditions for good mass transit. The reason why businesses like to congregate in the city core is that this creates wealth for the businesses and their employees via agglomeration - I think this dynamic should not be ignored, even though it might not be immediately visible.
Also in this business-concentrated city, the synergy you describe (and I agree exists) is set up to benefit business. What about synergies between people?
Better small, concentrated, cities as existed before the automobile that, had jobs scattered throughout them.
(To be clear cities’ downtowns are always more commerce oriented, the agora or the forum come to mind. But go to Rome and see how small the forum of the largest city in antiquity is. Place of business wasn't restricted to one place)
I find with businesses concentrated, it's much easier to make decisions about housing. In Los Angeles, it was difficult to predict where my next job might be. It could be downtown, it could be Santa Monica, Marina Del Rey, the valley, Pasadena, Orange County, etc. I could face a 90 minute drive or a ten minute bike ride to get to work. Even if I didn't change jobs, a company might move from one side of L.A. to the other (and this did happen to both my wife and me while we lived in L.A. although her location change was less dramatic than mine). Dispersed job centers often meant passing up on jobs because the location was inconvenient.
In contrast, in Chicago, the key thing is being able to get to downtown reasonably quickly by public transportation (or, when I was single, I had an apartment that allowed me to easily bike or walk to and from the Loop if I so chose and the weather wasn't awful). One thing I noticed was that in the 90s, many tech companies were located in those outer suburbs and living anywhere but near downtown made commuting challenging. In contrast, since I moved back to Chicago 11 years ago, almost all tech jobs are downtown, which seems a likely consequence of the fact that being close to competitors makes it easier to find employees.
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1. There are, of course, bits of exceptions to his with some scattered business areas in some of the suburbs, most notable Oak Brook, Evanston and Schaumburg being the primary examples in my experience.
San Francisco hasn't been known for its soaring towers (though recently the leaning sort are making headlines), but it is centralised and well-served by transit both within the city and from surrounding communities. To this extent, it resembles Chicago.
At the same time, the Bay Area as a whole strongly resembles Los Angeles, with various tech hubs ranging from San Jose to San Francisco, and including Sunnyvale, Fremont, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park Redwood City, and Oakland. If you find yourself job hopping between these spots, commutes get long fast, and there's no one best place to live.
Chicago was built around rail with both the urban CTA and regional Metra rail service. Suburbs first emerged as points on spokes radiating out from downtown. Those have since filled in considerably, and inter-suburban commutes are both real and every much as horrible a mess as you'd imagine them to be.
Los Angeles grew up as an automobile city with boulevards and freeways, and looks it. Absent the constraints of terrain, what defines Los Angeles is a grid-pattern of both streets and freeways. Whilst Chicago does have a street grid, that grid does not define the city in the same way Los Angeles does.
If LA had instead opted to build distributed clusters of both high-rise (office/commercial) and low-rise (residential) towers, on a hub-and-spoke transit system, it might offer a far more reasonable set of commute and living options. There's no strict need for towers, so much as there is for connections between them.
Arguably, another element that defines much of Chicago is its greystone and bungalow residential styles. These don't reach the density of 5--6 story apartment construction typical of Europe, but are far denser than the predominantly single-story fully-separated housing of the Los Angeles area. As with elsewhere, density makes transit service, whether bus or rail, far more viable.
LA is the way it is due to the history of how it was developed. It's a desert city and they had to develop large tracts at one time to finance the water infrastructure to bring water in from elsewhere.
LA was spread out like it is before it became the poster child for the cult of the car. It was like that when it was served by trolleys and foot traffic.
I don't know what the solution is going forward, but planning around cars is not how that got started in the case of LA.
That said, Chicago formed as a transportation hub, first based on the Great Lakes and rivers (the Des Plaines connects to the Mississipi), providing a transit point between the middle of the US, from Minneapolis to New Orleans and via the Missouri and Ohio river systems about 2/3 of the continent, to the East Coast via the St. Lawrence Seaway and Erie Canal.
Railroads were built to outlying suburbs by 1850, at which time there were no automobiles at all. Chicago's population as of 1900 exceeded 1 million. Remember that mass adoption of the automobile in the US only began in 1901 with Ford's Model T, and wasn't substantial for another two to three decades.
Los Angeles by contrast had no natural harbour (the San Pedro breakwater was completed in 1910), was largely a ranching and orchard region through the early 20th century, and was by far secondary to San Francisco in importance to California until 1906, the year of the Great Earthquake and Fire.
Following that event, with increased oil exploration in Los Angeles (there remain many operating wells within the city itself), and especially growth during WWII, Los Angeles eventually grew. But it had only 100,000 souls in 1900, surpassing 1 million in 1930, at which point automobile use was strongly established. The General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy put an end to what public transit remained from 1938--1950.
Chicago's suburban commuter rail was spared by virtue of the fact that it uses freight rail rights-of-way, which couldn't be dismantled (though some lines did fold, especially after the Interstate Highway System was built). Chicago's El similarly survived though I'm not familiar with the specific history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chicago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Los_Angeles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
Chicago 1906 map showing well-developed rail trasnportation network.
https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/workspace/handleMed...
By contrast, Los Angeles at about the same time, dominated by streets:
https://slippyjenkins.com/four-ridiculously-hi-res-maps-of-l...
And they are reasonably well-connected, certainly by freeways (which are not grid-based), but increasingly so by mass transit; LA had a deservingly bad reputation for mass transit in the past, but it has made unimaginably large strides forward. On top of that, the bus system is vast and fills in the gaps where rail does not go.
How much such considerations weighed in to Cold War urban planning in the US I'm not sure.
What is unique about LA is the water rights. To get access, those small towns had to agree to get incorporated within greater LA.
Point being that other developing new cities (particularly in the south/sunbelt, think, say, Phoenix, DFW, and Atlanta, which grew tremendously from the 1960s to the present (air conditioning had a huge effect). Or any attempts to make LA more centralised or rationalised in terms of transporation.
My ideal model is not suburbia - thats what “LA” is to me. Nor is it NYC a city that has grown way beyond breaking even with return to scale
My ideal model is, for all its problems, Thessaloniki or Bilbao. That is smaller, forgotten European cities.
There your Dr.’s office can be a short walk from home because 6 story buildings are in fact very high density. If need be most inhabitants can walk downtown, but dont need to because public transport can be plentiful and cheap because the city is dimensionally small.
There is no way to support this statement on any economic grounds. If New York City wasn't almost as committed to not building as San Francisco it could be have a far greater population. The constant run up in property prices shows that even with the efforts to stop people moving they still want to.
If Tokyo can grow 50% in a decade in a country with declining population NYC could grow much more. People want to live in NYC. Let them.
Let me guess, you never go anywhere without your car??
Europe is mostly very many small, sub million, cities with jobs scattered throughout the city largely created before the automobile.
The jobs are spread throughout the city in the buildings people live in you can choose to live in the neighborhood where you work.
Or, the American model where all the jobs are in the city core in monsterous buildings (most not skyscrapers, but anyway ugly orgies of concentrated office space) while everyone lives far in a suburb.
This is a creation of modern urban planning; it's not a "natural" consequence of having skyscrapers. Europe has its megacities and hyperdense cores too (which do feature mixed business/residential use, unlike much of the U.S.), and America has its scattered historical towns.
And, it wasn't to pick on the US - Charleston SC or Savanah GA come to mind as an very livable cities (minus the tourists). Instead US cities suffered the advent of the car more since they were newer, less established.
Finally, I agree that (mis century “progressive”) Urban planning is mostly to blame. Where I don't agree is that the skyscraper is a blameless misused tool of the urban planner. In the cities that built them, skyscrapers hurt the city.
And European “megacities” are as unlivable (unless you’re 25-35) as any American megacity. Give me Bologna over Milan any day.
Concentrated business districts only help you avoid using a car if you live on top of them.
Population density is too low for anything but a few restaurants and a grocery store anywhere but in the city center and a few larger shopping centers around the outskirts. The mix with businesses give mostly lunch restaurants that are closed in the evenings and it's just as much a ghost town as anything else after hours.
I could easily walk two towns over, and a major European town was a short train ride away.
We certainly didnt have night clubs we certainly had fancy restaurants everywhere catering to families who wanted a night out.
Europe is not very monolithic!
Better an architecture where a core largely has everything it needs locally and only occasionally needs to go elsewhere; hierarchically seeking larger, harder to reach, memories
This is not the suburban model - in suburbia everything is far from everything. Even your next door neighbor. Instead, in my model, everything you typically immediately need (grocer, baker, pharmacist) is within walking distance (ideally, no public transit needed!).
Side-note: Learning about one-plus-fives was one of those "learning to see the lines of code in the Matrix" moments. They're everywhere. In my experience, for all their shine and gloss, most of them kind of suck. But kinda crappy housing is better than no housing.
That said, I do agree that there are only a few areas in the country where the main barrier to an ideal density is allowing more skyscrapers instead of mid-rises. Manhattan north of the financial district and south of midtown is one such area, parts of SF are another. But many, many more cities would see more benefits of moving from low density single-family homes and detached lots to mid-rises.
This obsession never went away. I can't really explain it. Maybe the sensory stimulation, maybe the comforting premise of an active hive of other human life, maybe something else, but it remains as important to me as ever. I think the skyscraper city is a little like the symphony orchestra: it has an object-level aesthetic, but on the meta level it's a celebration of civilization itself.
It is incredibly fortunate that my interest in computers translates to one of the few jobs in America that will pay enough to live in a place like this. By the same token, it's distressing that such places are so precious and so rare.
Ever since I was a little kid I dreamed of living in a city with skyscrapers, and my partner's demand that we move out to the suburbs nearly ended our relationship.
But it did help me discover that the most important thing for me was walkability. I could compromise on the highrise living, but we moved to a car-dependent neighborhood, and that's the part I despised most, and it significantly negatively affected my physical health, and thus then my mental health. I strongly believe that car-dependent suburbs are just plain awful.
In the end, money cured it for the most part. We rented a small studio pied-à-terre downtown and would spend a couple days there a week. We actually didn't do this for too long because it wasn't long until Covid hit and downtown basically died, so we didn't renew our lease. Not sure what's next.
Still, I think it's important to have skyscraper cores and we should build them closer to the economic limits than the present legal limits.
Which is why NYC sidewalks get used so much, they are a very useful form of transportation. Which has positive knock on effects in terms of human health etc.
Except every floor doesn't have an equal effect? Lower levels and rooftops are going to host the majority of destinations, while mid-levels are most likely to be homes and offices that are adding to the pool of people able to walk to those destinations.
It’s a basic economic reality is if a restaurant needs X customers to be viable a city will have some constant * population/X restaurants. Be they in 5 story buildings or 50.
So once you hit the point where the foot traffic retail is all viable, there's a stretch where there's not a real need for new businesses and any new competitors would face a large disadvantage from location.
Not that there aren't ways to design around that to make very high density areas viable, but it's not a simple line graph correlation.
You can't simplify away the varying value of certain land for certain uses and still pretend you're doing economics.
Add cost and you can have almost unlimited density without inherently limiting the number of restaurants much like how a mall can have 100 stores all selling different kinds of clothing.
A world of steel-glass-concrete is incomplete in this sense, and I now see the appeal of low-rise neighborhoods that can distill a mixture of energies and create lively street scenes, quiet parks, and so forth.
I currently am on the 40th with a view away from the building. I am trying to move to the 12th with a view across the facilities (pools mostly, it’s Asia). I’m curious whether that will change how I feel about the building.
Tower social housing failed, mostly because it turns out concentrating poverty is a terrible idea, but that would be true if it were towers or two-story houses. And separating uses aggravated the problems by providing less diversity of people who could keep "eyes on the street" active. But none of that is really inherent to tower design.
Think town square.
Sunlight could be dealt with by not enclosing all sides of the common area, have the south side be windows to the outside.
But in an enclosed courtyard, there would be apartments across the way at eye level. Though that's solved by scale. With a large enough complex, the courtyard distance isn't much different than apartments across the street.
They're likely much closer together than any opposing courtyard windows would be.
It's a bit different since you have two separate, not necessarily functionally or aesthetically compatible, structures. But that almost certainly makes it worse than if you were able to design opposing views simultaneously.
If it is formed of curved walls, it could be a nice place to put a solar-thermal plant.
I was surprised that building codes allowed such construction here in the UK as there’s lots of rules about sound insulation between units.
I do love courtyards though, and am always a little heartbroken when I visit someone at a place that has one and realize that no one really uses it.
Don’t blame skyscrapers for bad architecture and urban planning.
I live in a 76-story tower and people are pretty friendly and you say hello by the pool, etc. There’s more community here than in most of the blocks of 4-5-story houses I’ve lived on. You also have the staff around, so even when you are alone you can still say g’day to a few people, which is a big deal for instance in lockdowns.
And because the towers are surrounded by smaller buildings (not everyone can afford to live in the towers) there is plenty of vibrant life out on the street. Arguably more so than in the more spread-out areas, with the exception of Chinatown.
Sure, SF FiDi is an apocalypse after dark, but that’s not about skyscrapers, it’s about cynical and uncaring planners.
Admittedly I'm British so my view on things is a bit skewed but I'd definitely call that polite rather than friendly. Here in the UK we say a happy, cheery hello to people even if we actively hate them.
Where I grew up, where apartment buildings are very common middle class options, kids often socialised in the common areas - gardens, swimming pool, etc. Where I live now it’s a concern to buy where my daughter can have a nice community of kids to hang out with (we now live in a rented house that has a large common lawn connecting the backs of the block and kids play in this space all day long).
Do you really? There are lots of cities outside the US with 6-story or 12-story buildings that are very vibrant. We don't really need skyscrapers for that.
Yes. Your desires and preferences aren’t objectively correct, in case you’re shocked here.
I wouldn't want to live there. And mind you, I was born in the center of Prague's Jizni mesto, which is a district designed in the 70s by communist government (to solve a housing crisis), build with cookie-cutter, 8-12 store, grey and boxy appartment buildings. Certainly not ideal urbanistically, very little commercial zoning, but still quite a bit of greenery (and from the 6th floor, we can actually view about 30 km to the countryside). In fact, some claim there was more space dedicated to greenery when it was built than in modern capitalist "luxury residential" developments.
Singapore is an awesome example of a coty filled with skyscrapers but no grid, amd it feels amazing and spacious.
But note that in other places there is plenty of middle ground. I live in a city where most buildings are in the range of 4 to 12 stories (someone actually computed the average height of a building and it's 5.15 stories) and it's enough for streets to be bustling with activity, and for being able to live without a car.
I do like the skyscraper aesthetic, but I also feel that once you go beyond a certain threshold, buildings start becoming soulless, and it also starts becoming harder to have regular, non-luxury shops at the street level due to that space being incredibly scarce, so the level of "boringness" goes up again (although not to the levels of suburbs, of course). So to me, mid-rise buildings (maybe with a few skyscrapers here are an there) are a good equilibrium. YMMV, of course.
I prefer mountains myself
I do think mountains give a similar effect, having interesting variations in height and a sense of being "walled in." I reliably feel like crap at elevation though.
ok, what if a human wants to live in a very tall building?
I will challenge you on this. 80m-120m buildings are the most economic choice almost everywhere: material costs, infrastructure cost, service cost.
Here is a modern example in Sweden, in Västerås.
https://www.e-architect.com/sweden/swedens-tallest-timber-bu...
If you really like to build taller, here is a twenty storey building in Skellefteå, Also in Sweden.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/oct/14/skellef...
[1] “the study found that the CO2 intensity (tons of CO2 emissions per dollar of output) of lumber production is about 20 percent less than that of fabricated metal products, under 50 percent that of iron and steel, and under 25 percent that of cement. In addition, shifting construction toward lumber products lowers the GDP cost of meeting the emissions cap by approximately $500 million and reduces the carbon price.”
https://news.mit.edu/2019/taking-carbon-out-construction-wit...
If you’re comparing a 4-story building made of wood compared to comcrete then sure it has less emissions. But if you want to build four 4-story wood instead of one 16-story concrete, it’s not mecessarily so.
There's a limit to how many people can be on a metro, grocery store, etc. There's also a hard limit on how much you can scale the infrastructure before residents start choosing transportation options, that make the issue worse (like cars).
The infrastructure also have to support a significant increase in garbage creation and resupplies for stores. If one of the main traffic arteries are blocked, the spillover to alternative routes might exceed the capacity and create delays, which are incredibly expensive.
A lower density neighborhood, might not use the infrastructure as close to its maximum capacity on a day to day basis, but that creates redundancy for when a road is closed for maintenance and significantly lowers the risk of expensive delays.
As with everything, there's several trade-offs between the options, and I think it's hard to give a definitive answer on what has the lowest emission, etc in a cradle to grave analysis. My personal preference is to take all such estimates with a significant "milage may vary" disclaimer
There are diminishing returns with density and (transportation) energy use:
* https://www.grida.no/resources/5414
* https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/environment...
IMHO getting to 50-75 inhabitants per hectare, which gives <15GJ/person/year (where most EU cities are at), is a good place to aim for. Once you're at 100ppl/ha then there's not much improvement going to 125, 200, or more.
I get the feeling that six story limits would only work for the developed west.
https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/why-china-is-cra...
That is a very unfortunate example.
If you just decided tomorrow that half of residential 3 floors should instead be 6 floors, that would already go some way to helping things! And if you space stuff out nicely you can have a very nice city! Just like… build a bit higher.
The City of Paris (the classical mid-rise downtown without the La Défense skyscraper CBD), has a population density of around 20000pp/km2, climbing up to 50000pp/km2 in 11th arrondissement.
Downtown Tokyo and London are about the same.
In the developing world, some cities achieve much higher densities with only low rise buildings. Cairo is twice higher at around 40000pp/km2, but granted, the lack of urban planning and mass transit makes it inefficient too, and quite frankly, unlivable.
The only skyscraper district than can rival those is midtown Manhattan, which shies at around 20000km2. However it takes tightly packed skyscrapers to achieve it, at a much lower overall energy efficiency.
Depending on what your definition of "skyscraper" is, they do tend to either add density, increase average unit size, or both. Comparing apples to apples, NYC's densest 5-6 story residential neighborhoods (e.g. East Village) are less dense than the high-rise residential neighborhoods like Upper East Side and Upper West Side. And on top of that, I can tell you that apartments are larger on the UES and UWS.
This Wikipedia article conveniently compares city districts by density. You can see here that Yorkville (part of UES) is extremely dense compared to the densest districts in other cities like Paris, and much denser than community board 3 in Manhattan which is a very dense residential mid-rise neighborhood: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_city_districts_by_po...
Note also that Yorkville isn't even full of high-rises. Most of the side streets are mid-rise like east village. It gets the 50% extra density from consistent high-rises along the avenues, and a smattering of high-rises peppering the side streets.
But that won’t happen between buildings constructed by different companies so it would have to be mandated in some way. Maybe modular cable cars that can be put up between buildings later?
um, those crumbling, 40 years old, 15m across, entirely uninsulated, six stories buildings obliterating every surfaces within 25 miles in every direction from the Imperial Palace in Tokyo...those are...not exactly wonderlands always.
I believe the OP's point is that when usable space in a building goes unleased, it makes it hard for the investor to turn a profit. Therefore there is no economic incentive to build a taller building.
I find this argument a bit hard to understand for another reason, though. If there is no demand for space, then why does anyone construct new buildings, and why is rent so high in places like NYC? It seems to me like there is actually incredible demand for space in dense cities.
That is added on to the fact that skyscrapers are also engineering marvels, and the cost per unit goes up quite a bit once you have to start dealing with those problems, compared to the much more standard 6 story building as an example.
An additional novelty factor is that actually supporting the weight of the tower will require different techniques (and significantly higher costs) depending on the type of land the desired build site happens to be on.
All of these things create something of a price floor for rents.
Keep in mind too that the Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world for 40 years --- it held the title from 1930 until 1970 when the World Trade Center towers exceeded it. (The Empire State Building topped out in September, 1930, well before construction was comleted.) Conventional wisdom long held that supertowers were lagging economic indicators and foretold recessions. There's some truth to that.
South-East Asia (Bangkok, Jakarta, KL etc) after the 1998 crisis was full of skyscrapers that were never even finished before the money ran out, the Burj Khalifa opened up just when Dubai's economy went into freefall, and Calgary is a recent example of skyscrapers being completed at exactly the wrong time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28873926
These particular towers are the architectural equivalent of cryptocurrency: valuable solely for their wastefulness.
- The pre-commit issue - In the western world (not always the same in China, Dubai, etc.) most developers work on a debt finance model where they have to sell a certain percentage of apartments or pre-lease a certain amount of office space before the finances come together to develop a tall building. The taller you go the tougher it gets.
- Market reactions to complex ownership structures. Owners for office buildings are still typically single institutions. Owners for residential buildings are typically individuals with some kind of shared structure for payment of common building issues. When you get a tall building that contains offices, hotels, residential, retail, etc. it all becomes complex to manage and many potential investors/owners/purchasers have a major feat of this that drive them to simpler mostly single-use structures.
- Airspace limitations for aircraft manouvring. Though the enforcement of these varies by country - some are strong on it, others ignore them (Taipei 101 in Taiwan is one that is very close to flightpaths). Helicopters to urban hospitals can also be a big thing.
This is something that always surprised me of the US. About 5 million people live in condos in the US. 65 million people live in condos in Brazil. It is not common at all in Brazil for buildings to be owned by single individuals. What part of the system creates this difference?
American local zoning laws forbid building anything besides single family homes in the vast majority of land. Some are even stricter banning even renting out rooms in those one-story homes.
(More accurately land nearby commutable jobs, sure one can build apartments in the middle of nowhere, but the housing isn't needed there.)
When I lived in Singapore most people live in apartments (government public housing). But damn near (not all) would love to own a landed home (single family home) if they can afford it.
In Canada my grandparents bought a beautiful single family home when the city was around 60,000. They could afford it because it was on the outskirts, out their back window were farms.
Today the city is 1.4M and their neighborhood is “central” and highly desirable.
LA saw a population explosion around WW2 because the armament industries paid well and it wasn’t hard to buy your own home due to the massive empty space.
I think skyscrapers look cool, but from a practical point of view they're pointless, especially in places like Dubai, where land (plot size) is not yet an issue.
Why would we not consider simply making tall buildings proportionally wide instead of this obviously flawed tippy needle thingy?
Problems with tippy needles include: foundations and their connections to bedrock, simple physical fulcrum principles, and the obvious inability to spread forces over a larger area. It’s a bit like trying to hold a large Christmas tree up with a small stand with low mass… doomed to problems
Universally hated. People didn't want to only go where the walkways let them go. Turns out we're lazy (https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/oct/02/walkways-in-t...).
They are making a slight comeback but as more of a leisure thing I think - somewhere nice/novel to go for a stroll on a sunny day, rather than when doing your morning power-walk from the tube/bus station to your office etc (e.g. New York high line type thing)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Paolo+Soleri+arcology&iar=images&i...
There was a study awhile back that showed people were a bit more agitated / negative-feeling when walking past a very wide building vs narrow buildings in NYC. (I happened to live near and frequently pass that wide building, and like the study participants didn't like it.)
There are also downsides to deep buildings for residential use: they make reasonable apartment layouts hard because the windows are too far apart. Old deep warehouse buildings often get converted to over-sized loft apartment when converted. While living in a loft is sometimes romanticized for luxury living, the lack of windows and (thus) interior walls makes them a poor fit for families, and the large size makes them expensive for singles and couples.
When I first went to Paris I started with a boat ride along the Seine. I was flabbergasted by the beauty of the city. When at the end of the 90 min ride we turned the last turn and I saw the Eiffel Tower it was the biggest disappointment — it looked like a rusty nail in the Victorian painting. It looks nice when lighted at night though.
Still fun to sit on the lawn facing it at night with a beer or bottle of wine though.
We take all of this for granted much like we take most of modern life for granted. But the Eiffel Tower marked the beginning of modernism. Look at a lot of visual art from that era - it features the Eiffel Tower for instance. It was a shocking structure for its time.
It was the beginning of the mechanical and Industrial Age. Just fascinating.
I'm not a civil engineer, so I have no intuition for these types of things. But I'm certain I wouldn't have guessed that the limit here was 3km! My mind can't even visually picture a thing.
Note that after this quote, the article immediately discusses other constraints, including lateral loading, which dramatically reduce the upper limits. But I'm still boggling over the idea of a 3km tall tower -- it seems like it would just sink right into the earth!
One way of looking at how mountains can get so high is to think of them as if they already have collapsed on themselves. There's no more collapsing possible, so they can pile up higher. A lot like the Pyramids, they're so big and so old and haven't fallen down because they can't, they're basically a collapsed heap already.
Which is something Isaac Arthur mentions in his YouTube series on space elevators, if you can make the base wider, you can make the top higher, and then you don't need Graphene or Scrith or other future super-strong materials to go high enough (in theory, in practise the base would have to get wider than Earth).
Rock is also stronger than dirt. In fact, if you like up dirt a km deep, you end up with rock. (Sedimentary rock to be specific.)
I also think they mean something that could be practically recognised as a building. You can build much higher if you are not restricted by a traditional proportions of a building (for example a pyramid or dome).
As to the building sinking -- it is not a difficult problem to solve. The reason some buildings face problem is that this is just a cost issue -- they guessed they need X amount of effort to provide stable base for the building and they guessed wrong. In practice there exists very simple algorithm to provide stable base -- drill to the rock face and use the underlying rock rather than possibly unstable ground. The reason this is not always used is because it can be very costly.
Lower levels out of concrete, then going up, steel, then aluminum and finally composite for the spire.
The problem is exponential in nature.
If elevators are the limiting factor, I wonder how much of an engineering challenge it would be to have multiple elevator cars in a shift. I'm picturing a system where each floor has some number of elevator car parking spots off of the main shafts, and elevator cars move backward then horizontally first to get to the main shaft to travel vertically.
The other limiting factor I could see though is limits on parking, public transportation and utilities.
The solution is cable-less elevators. Rack and pinion elevators seem to be used only for construction elevators, guessing NVH is not up to snuff. Thyssen Krupp has maglev elevators though (experimental): https://engineered.thyssenkrupp.com/en/multi-our-sideways-mo...
edit: Also if you go too fast it'd be really uncomfortable due to the air pressure changing too quickly. Vertical acceleration is also really unpleasant, personally I find the quickly accelerating elevators I've used to be very nauseating.
Fire.
Yes they do! I'm glad you mentioned them cause it isbpretty legit. I know one of their graphic designers (for brochures and stuff), and he was proud of their experimental elevator in Atlanta, Ga
Manhattan actually has a parking cap; with Manhattan today, the view is that building more parking mostly just encourages people to use it, and to accommodate Manhattan's existing land use would probably require paving over Manhattan, the rivers surrounding it, and a whole lot more.
Also, why isn't building down economical?
For one thing, many jobs can't be done remotely.
But it's not just about work. People want to go to restaurants, community centers, live entertainment. The more sprawl there is, the fewer people can live within reasonable distance of it.
Even if you want to live in a single family home, tall buildings are good. Instead of having to drive an hour through a landscape of other single family homes, you can live in one closer to the city while some of the people who used to live there can live in the city because they prefer being within walking distance to having a half acre of grass. Currently there are more people who want that than most cities have housing units and many of them get priced out, which in turn makes it more expensive to live in the suburbs.
Several issues:
* Digging is expensive. There's several factors for this, but some unavoidable stuff include things like "you need to put the stuff you took out of the ground somewhere."
* The deeper you go, the hotter it gets. Although it's probably not that bad if you're only digging a mile or so.
* Natural light is hard to come by underground.
* Groundwater intrusion becomes a much more significant concern.
* Having to pump all of the sump water and sewage up to the sewer lines is not going to be fun.
The elevator cars couldn’t have cables of course, but they could be driven by electric motors on the cars themselves (powered by induction), driving a gear wheel that runs on a fixed track on the side of the shaft.
You mean a paternoster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift)?
This image shows it off pretty well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_lobby#/media/File:World_Tr...
It's a beautiful building. I seem to remember seeing window air-conditioners, because it's too old to install central air. Yet people still want to be there.
However, the finish was a bit of a letdown: "These building height restrictions make us all poorer [etc.]". I didn't even think, from the build-up, that they were going that way ...
That is, buildings created purely out of spite for a neighbour. There’s some very funny examples.
I saw a drawing somewhere online that just captured my imagination - a cathedral-like building on a scale absolutely dwarfing regular buildings. I'm 90% sure it was actually Warhammer 40,000 concept art.
The key is removing the through traffic. Walkways are unnecessary.
EDIT: Fixing "vertical transportation" to "horizontal transportation"
I think a good rule of thumb is to see if someone in theoretical worse conditions for some outcome is doing better on that outcome.
So it isn’t natural conditions that limit San Fransican skyscrapers because Tokyo faces those conditions too.
But this is a cool article exploring all this and the economic cost of doing it this way.
Of course massive economic price pressure and/or governmental action would be needed for such a project. It may have to piggyback off of a more critical infrastructure project, such as the support structures/legs of a space elevator (like Zalem in Battle Angel Alita).
When I think of neat places I’ve been to, places that really filled my senses, awed, inspired, they were not the sterile developments approved by zoning and urban design panels. They were more organic. Some examples of the places That come to mind include Rhodes, water towns outside of Shanghai, and random plazas in Florence.
I believe we need to trust that people generally want to make the world beautiful, and let them do it in their own way. I certainly won’t have the same eye to beauty as everyone else, but that’s okay. It makes the world quirky and unique.
I believe that federal law now prohibits any other antennaes from overtaking them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_in_...
In a typical skyscraper there that many seats at the windows anymore, most workplaces are closer to the center, where there are no daylight anymore anyway.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HXZ_0wOY96E
[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1eIxUuuJX7Y
As an Eastern European who lately has developed a casual interest in urban planning, I wholeheartedly agree with a low to mid-rise approach to urban development.
Both in my home town (Bucharest) as well as in my current place of residence (Amsterdam) by far the least pleasent areas are the places where high-rises concentrate (Pipera and Zuidas respectively).
The real world is generally not well captured in unrestrained markets. You got externalities and tragedy of the commons not taken into account.
If people always bought what benefitted them and society then nobody would be a heroin junkie, an alcoholic or obese.
I don’t think high rise cities are really a path to better societies. I loved high rise building when I was younger but today I must say that most of the cities I enjoy most are not cities with tall buildings.
Not everything of value can easily be captured in a market based system. They tend to only capture what can easily be measured. However the things which can easily be measured are often the least important things in life.
Every high rise city has low rise neighbourhoods, but low rise cities don’t have high rise neighbourhoods.
So it’s a choice between a mix, or pure low rise, and I really dislike when the low rise people choose to force their taste onto others.
But we do.
I have a feeling if expensive city center land became a tax liability (as it should be) rather than a gold-like asset to be jealously hoarded we wouldnt see the NIMBYism that led to this tangled web of regulations.
High rise buildings are quite simply a path to better land use in the most valuable and most productive urban centers - think Manhattan. They will always be rare elsewhere, precisely because they do come with drawbacks that make them uneconomical otherwise.
Might be good for a retirement tower… safety moat and all.
What negative externalities does densification impose? He provides evidence that the laws limiting building height increase housing costs and reduce economic opportunity.
Providing market freedom, where such freedom would provide a clear social and economic benefit, in the absence of evidence it produces negative externalities, is economically sound, and the anti-libertarian insistence that it's not is what is the actual ideologically-motivated position.
>>today I must say that most of the cities I enjoy most are not cities with tall buildings.
So move to a smaller town, or the suburbs, where land expense doesn't drive densification? Why oppose what people prefer, and artificially limit the density of the economic cores of large metropolises?
These economic cores are a very limited set of geographically restricted zones that are hugely in demand places, for people all over the world to live, hire and work, and generate positive externalities for the entire world, to the extent that they can - through rising density and better transportation networks - build on their agglomeration effects that raise the per capita productivity and innovativeness of their residents.
There are a great many alternatives to these regions if what one prefers low-density living. It's not reasonable to deny the development path that is clearly the aggregate preference of society at large just to maintain low density in these select locales.
The vast in-between of freeway interchanges, cookie-cutter subdivisions, strip malls, and big box stores, where the tallest thing around is the McDonalds or ExxonMobil sign, is an abomination. I will fill up at those gas stations and eat at those McDonalds on the way between places worth being, but whoo boy, if I had to live in a place like that I'd vote for demagogues too.
I'm not a principled libertarian. Ideally, the law would stipulate that people who build to your preferences are hanged for war crimes. However, I suggest that we implement a free(r) market so that we can both live in the kinds of places we want, instead of one excluding the other.
That's cool. So you can move to a place that's mostly low-or mid-rise buildings and can allow others to move to a place that has skyscrapers. Lucky for you almost every city has very few skyscrapers.
I love to go to work by bike, for instance. Free sky is an important part of the fun of it. I couldn't imagine just hopping in some huge elevator, enter the subway in the basement just to enter the elevator in an office building.