Proposed Oklahoma skyscraper gets redesign to become USA's new tallest building | Hacker News Reader

Proposed Oklahoma skyscraper gets redesign to become USA's new tallest building

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72 pointsgeox145 comments

Speaking as a nearly lifelong resident of Tornado Alley, I wonder how this thing, especially its upper floors, will fare the first time it meets up with a Moore-level storm (either 1999[0] or 2013[1]).

[0]: https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/about/history/may3rd/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Moore_tornado

Taipei 101 has survived many a typhoon.

typhoon != tornado.

I am sure they have something in mind, though.

Japan is really good at designing skyscrapers that handle earthquakes.

But whenever I see one of these skyscrapers, I wonder if Freud had a point...

Sometimes a skyscraper with balls is just a skyscraper with balls.

Just as a frame of reference, the most severe typhoon to directly hit Taipei seems to be Typhoon Morakot, which recorded wind speeds of 150 km/h (90 mph). The most severe tornado to hit Oklahoma seems to be from 1999, in which wind reached 484 km/h (301 mph).

another important point, typhoons are very big, so wind blows against a building in one direction. Tornadoes are very small, and would push on a skyscraper in multiple directions in the rare event that it hits a skyscraper and doesnt immediately dissolve due to lack of airflow. Airflow from multiple directions would mostly cancel out.

They should just make it look like a tornado, honestly. Then it makes more sense. “We’re constantly bombarded with tornados in OK, and this serves as a monument and reminder of the seriousness of that,” said developer, now actually making any sense.

On the other hand there might be great views of distant storms from the top floors.

>> I wonder how this thing, especially its upper floors, will fare the first time it meets up with a Moore-level storm

It almost certainly wouldn't meet up with one. The Moore tornado was an EF-5 tornado, there have only ever been 59 confirmed EF-5 tornadoes in the US since 1950. The last Moore-level storm was the Moore storm itself in 2013.

The chance of any specific building in Tornado Alley being hit by a tornado of any strength in a year is said to be 1 in 5,000. Violent tornadoes are 0.1% of all tornadoes.

In addition, Oklahoma is not the only state at risk of EF-5 tornadoes. If you're not going to build in Oklahoma due to tornado risk, you probably shouldn't build in Dallas, Chicago, Minneapolis, or Omaha either, among other places.

Map of all confirmed EF-5 tornado locations in the US: https://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/f5torns.html.

I think the odds that this gets built are slim to none--the economics won't make sense, because the property values in OKC don't warrant it. The only way it could happen is if the owner wanted to do it as a vanity project, and was willing to lose a lot of money.

Anybody can make a drawing of a supertall building. It takes a lot to go from a rendering to actually building it.

Hudson Yards in NYC makes sense on paper for that size/density of a city, yet it's a financial failure. Something like this building in OKC makes zero sense to even start.

Even Hudson Yards only made sense because they could use zoning shenanigans (drawing lines to put it in the same district as Central Park and a very poor area of Harlem [0]) to get state funding for it as an "economically troubled area".

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-12/the-visa-...

Any building above about seventy some floors gets taller by ego, not financial value.

>slim to none

"and slim just left town" if you want to keep to the Western motif

Having grown up in Okla. City, I am surprised and proud that they're contemplating this structure. If it comes to be, it's a sign of a can-do attitude that this region has always boasted.

However, in recent years, earthquakes have become increasingly common in Oklahoma, probably because of oil and gas fracking projects in the eastern part of the state. Just the other day there were six earthquakes, including a 4.1 magnitude (one report stated 4.4 magnitude) quake in Oklahoma City. I assume modern skyscraper design can handle such events, for example designed to sway several feet in each direction, massive springs or other vibration suppressing mechanisms in the base as per Tokyo buildings, but it's still a bit worrisome.

Tornadoes are also frequent phenomena; every spring, TV shows would be interrupted for tornado alerts or warnings on almost a weekly basis. You get used to it. But when it comes to a high rise building, the damage to windows could be massive.[1]

Anyway, good luck to them and I hope the construction goes forward (and finds enough tenants to be worth it).

1. https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2023/12/18/proposed-okc...

This is awesome. A lot of good comes from colocating office work into a central building so the outlying areas can be used for "life affirming" purposes.

Housing, parks, churches, restaurants, entertainment etc.

We should want more "lone wolf" office buildings like this in every city.

They're rather expensive though, so you might be able to get more of what you like using the money differently.... instead of a single $750m 100-story tower in one block, build ten 10-story towers over 10* blocks, and you'd probably have $500m left over.

* Realistically, you could pack the equivalent square footage into less space than this, because you can build shorter buildings wider.

How do you figure this? One tower has less than 10x the elevators, less than 10x the footings, less than 10x the roof area, etc etc etc., vs 10 smaller buildings 1/10 the size. There are massive economies of scale to density.

Construction costs don't scale linearly with height, so I'd imagine the sweet spot of cost per square foot is a mid-rise building. But I admit I don't have the hard figures on hand.

You might need more elevator banks per floor, though - a high capacity office building usually has more worries about routing the elevators and might have extra banks on middle floors that you switch to, etc

I would definitely expect the elevator set up to be complex in a 90 floor building.

A single skyscraper with 10x the floors needs more than 10x the structural mass to stay up, involves far more complexity and they're actually notoriously inefficient for elevators and stairs (you need to provide 100 stories of just enough capacity to service your top 10 floors, not 10 stories, and end up with potentially 30 to 40% of your overall floor area as a service core)

The economy of scale comes from using up less high value land; everything else costs more

Sometimes skyscrapers have split elevators with lobbies at higher floors. To get to the very top you disembark half way up and then the capacity of these upper elevators can be less.

Actually, tall towers have many more elevators. Usually a set of express and local elevators, because someone on the top floor should not have a ten minute journey on an elevator making all stops.

It’s why tall buildings taper as they get taller, to minimize the amount of people transported to higher floors.

Physics probably has more to with the tapering than number of people transported

number of people transported dictates how many elevator shafts are needed, and express elevators to the top mean less leaseable space on lower floors. so less people at the top means more leaseable space.

there is a lot of work going into optimizing elevators so that as few shafts can be built as possible while keeping wait times to a minimum.

That's an understandable and interesting challenge

I can't think of a good way to say this, apologies if it comes across poorly.

I commented because it felt like cause and effect are backwards

Like, I'd easily believe it's more due to stability than being able to say "aw shucks, we wanted to put elevators there but we can't fit them"

It's like saying the skyscraper has an upside down pyramid to create a choke point. Just do that, don't fight physics too.

People don't go to floors just to fill the space, but the space kind of informs it. It's circular, as I ramble I understand better

Developers are in the business of renting out space, so anything that reduces rentable space is bad for business.

It's also why tall towers only get financed during times of easy credit; they don't make much financial sense otherwise. Most supertall buildings take many years to reach full occupancy, if they ever do at all; it is why the World Trade Center complex has not been fully completed to this date.

Have many architect friends. More stories (especially at common break points of >1, >10) means much more complicated design for elevators, emergency regulations, design against elements etc.

My assumption is like the other replies, taller is expensiver, but apparently sometimes there is a sweet spot for more height in one building, eg browsing around Wikipedia as a result of OP, the tallest building in Tulsa Oklahoma:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOK_Tower

> BOK Tower was built for the Williams Companies, whose CEO at the time, John Williams, was impressed by the Twin Towers and originally wanted to build two 25-story replicas in Tulsa. However, prior to construction, Williams was informed that having two separate towers would require more elevators than a single, larger tower.[citation needed] The plan for a quarter scale replica was then changed to a single 52-story tower, double the height of the two planned towers.

Hopefully someone fills in a citation!

That looks like potentially a lot of people coming into and out of one city block, like a 10X spike in density relative to everything else. There's public transit in OKC, https://www.embarkok.com/ and https://www.odot.org/transit/s5307/okc.htm, so maybe parking is not an issue, but the "flow" perspective will be interesting....

I haven't been to downtown OKC in a long while, but I don't call it having heaps of tall buildings. Having the tallest American building with not as much around it would look... interesting.

In fact, I recall the construction of a lot of OKC being 60s-70s era squat concrete bunkers. That was 20 years ago so maybe things have changed but it was sort of a depressing feel.

Last time I was there I feel like there were probably at least a dozen buildings that were ~30-60 floors, definitely not anything close to this, but it’s not like it’s going to be around a bunch of 6-12 story buildings… I do wonder what the economics of the building look like

Maybe it’s an intentional “middle finger” to the other US cities. Why else would you choose OKC for the tallest skyscraper? Literal dick measuring contest.

I highly doubt the private developer is spending billions of dollars to give the middle finger to other cities. Clearly they see demand and are trying to fill that demand at a profit.

Developers can be very adept at making money for themselves even as the project tanks. Not saying that’s what will happen here (I lack data) but it happens often.

Highly doubt? We’re in the midst of the biggest cultural clash in the US since the civil war, where the midwest is flanked on both sides of the country by liberal states/cities.

There’s no question that developer isn’t doing this only out of spite—the need for space must be there, but imagine the board room scene in the movie…

Architect/Urban planning: “we’ve designed a unique promenade with a four building complex, one that is primarily housing, next to shopping and office. A true “never leave your block” lifestyle with urban green space…

Developer: “I’m gonna stop y’all right there. Let’s put up the tallest tower in the US to tell everyone watch out! OKC is back and ready for action! Just give the rest of those woke cities the biggest salute you can imagine!”

Come on. The story writes itself!

Not literal, unless I've misread this story more than usual.

eyeroll you got me

Weird that the fact that this is in Oklahoma City specifically is left out. Yes, sure, that'd be the obvious choice, and I know most folks in the world and even the US would stop processing at "Oklahoma" anyway. But this is such a ludicrous project for OKC; why wouldn't it be in Tulsa or Muskogee or Bartlesville instead?

Regardless, the money going into this would be so much better spent across a wider area of the city, where it could actually contribute to other development and revitalization. Take a look at the Renaissance Center in Detroit for a great example of a block of high-intensity development in a crumbling city that did nothing to help the city's overall state, and probably made things worse in the short to medium term.

I'm not sure a lot of you have ever been to Oklahoma City or if you have, even recently. Tulsa is not the premier city in Oklahoma anymore and hasn't been for close to 2 decades. While this is a ridiculously tall proposed structure, Oklahoma City is growing fast and a lot of the residential domiciles in that area are full. 1,776 (a funny number) of housing isn't that much when we have entire subdivisions with 500 - 2000 houses going up all over the city at a constant rate. Will this be built, probably not. Will the smaller towers be built, quite possibly. I drive by the proposed spot often and it could support some of the smaller towers etc.

Doesn't seem like the author of the post is supportive of the proposal - but I'm also unsure if it's all parody. The renderings in this and a couple other articles look silly.

Haha, I had a good chuckle at the rendering with all the ads. The brew pub especially.

Is there enough office space demand for a building this size in Oklahoma City? Seems like a strange time to be building giant buildings for office space. It seems like the smaller buildings will have some housing, but still strange.

> Between all four buildings, they will include 1,776 residential units

America is incredible

Talking about supertall buildings in unexpected places... construction on the world's tallest building in Jeddah, that started over a decade ago but was halted for many years, is supposed to resume this year [1] (I'm not holding my breath).

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

It looks like Biff Tannen's Pleasure Paradise from Back to the Future 2.

Why does the picture make me think that much better use of resources would be to build more building of the size at bottom of this tower... Instead one of this is area where average height is not that high...

There's a reason skylines are basically look the same (like a standard deviation graph) - after a very short height, it's only worth going taller if the land is insanely valuable.

It's something like one or two floors in temperate areas, maybe a maximum of three in areas that get heavy snow.

Especially for commercial buildings, additional costs start to climb quickly (a one-floor building needs zero elevators, for example) above about five floors.

I would say 4 stories as building codes say that up to 4 stories can use wooden structures. After that, more expensive materials are required

The densification people are winning, at least on one block. Is Oklahoma one of the flat states? I wonder how far away this will be visible.

If it's anything like this, I would say from quite a long ways: https://thelostogle.com/2024/01/02/tlo-unveils-plans-to-buil...

I live 20 miles away from the current tallest building in Oklahoma (Devon Tower). If I stand on my roof (for an unobstructed view) I can see it clearly.

This will be 1,907 ft tall vs 844 ft for the Devon Tower.

That's pretty incredible. I live in rural Appalachia so I'm only used to seeing mountains that way for the most part and the extreme flatness of the midwest has always been interesting to me. If this gets built I may have to check it out just for the distance views haha

Having been to many (lived in one) Midwest cities - one block is hardly winning the battle or the war. It’s still 99% parking lots.

Where will all these occupants going to park?

in approximately 7.5 acres of parking ( assuming 2000 spaces, which is not likely enough, going by 1776 apartments alone )

it may be hard to get that in a below-grade deck

I would guess the very top would be about 50-60 miles to the horizon, depending on refraction. That assumes a perfectly clear day.

Oklahoma is about 4000 ft from the lowest point to the highest point.

I love it, but how is this thing going to handle a direct hit from an EF4/5 tornado? A very, very real possibility for OKC.

I think the obvious answer is to consider that the ones financing this are already billionaires so all they really need to do is to spend some of that coin on a ballistic glass exterior skin that would function as a prophylactic, protecting the tower from anything swirling around in the Oklahoma City sky. The damage to the high-rise towers in the Fort Worth tornado was largely due to glass shattering causing the interiors to be open to the winds. This one practical step could be at least 87% effective against intrusion of debris from outside the protective skin and maybe up to 98% effective against dispersal of contents inside the ballistic glass prophylactic skin. That will solve the problem of lost documents, furnishings, etc that existed after the Bank One Tower in Fort Worth was hit by a tornado.

They could even, for the science, use the central spire as a high altitude mount point for a radome so that they can issue weather forecasts and alerts well before the storms arrive. A nice, round white sphere on top of that spike would really dress it up in a way that is immediately useful to people all over the region.

To take that a step further they can even use the central spire as a sensor launch point so that they can refine existing severe weather models. All they need to do is to use the central spire as a sort of skewer, grease it up with a durable, environmentally friendly lubricant, and set up a string of rounded sensor packages, like a string of pearls, that are lightly tethered so that when the inevitable tornadic winds pass nearby the updraft pulls those sensors off in a steady stream and carries them on the wind across the landscape. The tether should be light enough that the turbulent flow of the winds severs the tethers allowing them to maximize their dispersal.

To aid in recovery of the data just color those sensor packages pearlescent white with a distinctive logo and make them large enough to be easily spotted once they come to rest on the ground and offer a reward to any Okie or anyone else downwind who returns one or reports finding one and you can get some useful science data about debris transport under severe weather conditions. You could even model the central opening to function as a whistle as they disperse so that they can be tracked as they travel on the winds. Years ago when the tornado hit Wichita Falls there was a guitar shop that had a large guitar on a pole outside. That guitar was found hundreds of miles away in Broken Bow, Oklahoma I think.

As a Texan I think we should all support this, for the science.

Love big buildings but this area is not very dense. Imagine a city downtown then make it 60% parking lots. Kind of convenient because of you don't have to worry about parking there but annoying once you want to walk to a coffee shop or something and realize it is a 15 minute walk.

Somewhere along the way, I came to the belief that the rebuilt One World Trade Center in NYC (1776 ft because we count the antennae as a spire) had been protected by a special law passed forbidding other buildings from exceeding that height so that it would retain a record height in honor of the 9/11 attack victims and responders.

Does anyone else remember that being a thing? I can't find references after a few web searches and I'm trying to decide if I'm the only one or if this is a Mandela Effect thing.

That would have to be a federal law passed by congress and signed by some president. Maybe some NYC law, but I can't imagine any other city in the US agreeing to that just because of some form of honor. If it turns out this is a thing, I will be thoroughly disgusted that we've spent effort on that vs something actual useful to the people.

Selfish of me, but I wish we got out of the sky scraper business. I’ve had chronic and acute sinusitis for years, and one result is I get vertigo very easily. And buildings are designed to sway in high winds, which I can feel. I can’t describe how awful it is to have vertigo in a high building.

I wonder how many other people suffer from this?

Lots of people live on the upper floors of skyscrapers without issues. Therefore, it can be presumed that a lot of people don't suffer from your symptoms. Some people having some adverse effects doesn't seem like a good reason to completely abandon the skyscraper business.

A tiny fraction of skyscrapers that are designed ever go up. At any point in time there are a dozen "tallest buildings in the world" on someone's drawing board, but when it comes time to build the money dries up. I'm not holding my breath for this one.

No mention in the article of whether or not the height increase is accomplished by adding a spire. Any idea what the max habitable floor height is?

That shape on top doesn’t allow for helipad, thought it was required

Maybe it will end up as a 1100 foot tall unfinished eyesore, like that hotel in North Korea.

Is there a market in OKC for this much space at the psf you’d need to support developing it? Or is this some local billionaire’s vanity project?

The way I see it is that it's an attempt to gain support by suggesting a two-phase construction project with only the intention of ever completing phase one — the smaller buildings.

This is exactly what it is - you see these kinds of proposals all the time and the real reason is to make some other proposal look reasonable and a compromise.

Skyscrapers are expensive to build and maintain.

They are built as a solution to high population density (the only place to go is up) combined with high demand and standard of living that can and will absorb the added cost.

Oklahoma City fails to meet these criteria.

To see this, compare OKC to a nearby major city like Chicago.

   - Population density of OKC is 1100 per sq. mile.  Chicago is 12000.

   - Per capita income in OKC is $36K.  Chicago is $46K.

Based on demographics, this sort of tower in OKC looks out of place --- more like maybe a marketing/financing gimmick rather than a serious proposal. I doubt it will ever be completed as proposed because most bankers/financers are likely to reach the same, rather obvious conclusion.

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/chicagocityilli...

It is odd, because OKC is a large city, but it's not dense. However, the Bricktown area of downtown is a cultural hub, which hosts the NBA team as well as lots of dining and activities.

Atlanta, GA has 3 times the population density of OKC and it hosts NBA, NFL and MLB teams. All without any apparent need/justification for the tallest building in the country.

There are lots of other similar examples. The justification for this in OKC just isn't there IMO --- and is unlikely to ever be there for one major reason --- limited water supply.

https://www.koco.com/article/oklahoma-city-utilities-departm...

Major high density cities demand a large water supply.

OKC is a bit weird, in that it's the center of a particular sort of religious movement. "Prosperity doctrine" types. The headquarters of Hobby Lobby and several other major "christian-owned" brands are there.

This is more about them proving themselves ascendant, than anything else, if I don't miss my guess. A better model might be Dubai, also home to some famously tall skyscrapers... its density is probably lower than can justify those, but they were built anyway to prove how ascendant their form of Islam is.

Record setting skyscrapers are usually a leading indicator of a bust, since they get financed when credit is at its easiest to get and there aren’t more pressing priorities to invest in.

Burj Khalifa is named so because Sheikh Khalifa of Abu Dhabi had to bail out both the Burj Dubai and the government of Dubai during the 2007 financial crisis.

This is more about them proving themselves ascendant

In other words, it's all about marketing --- not logic, reason, economics or good urban planning.

Even in cities that rationally justify tall buildings, the "tallest building" competition is always about showing off. They set the records with tall spires on top that don't have any usable floorspace.

Yes, the spires on top of rationally justified buildings is showing off.

In OKC, it's not just the spire but the entire building that is about showing off. The rationale is missing --- which is why I doubt it will ever be built as proposed.

This would be the sixth tallest building in the world. How many of the five above it meet your criteria?

This building would become a major tourist attraction. Will the leases and other income generated by the building be enough to pay off the bankers? If so, then it will likely be built.

How many of the five above it meet your criteria?

All of them have higher population density and per capita income in the area than OKC.

For example, Kuala Lumpur has 17X the population density of OKC.

Yes… a major tourist attraction in… Oklahoma. I’m sorry, but nobody is looking to go to Oklahoma on their vacation, especially not to see a tall building.

Nor was anyone looking to go to the Arabian Peninsula on their vacation 30 years ago, and yet here we are.

I did not know that was a hot vacation spot. But, even if it is, it has the advantage of being foreign and exotic. That can’t describe Oklahoma except in a negative sense.

It's like a 90min flight and $120 ticket for me. I would absolutely make a trip out there to see the tallest building in the US, especially with how out of place it would look next to the rest of the skyline.

Oklahoma has a pretty healthy tourism industry.

https://www.travelok.com/

Of the people who go to Oklahoma for vacation, I would expect some of them would definitely make a stop at this building.

All day on HN I hear the same song and dance, we need more housing density to combat high real estate prices. And then you see a city being proactive and doing something about it and you criticize it. Good on OKC to get ahead of the issue and make more housing stock available.

Have you been to Oklahoma City, or to Oklahoma in general? This makes as much sense as proposing that an expansive stockyard be constructed in the middle of San Francisco.

Among countless reasons not to build something like this in Oklahoma City, the place is basically nuked by tornados every so often.

Are tornados a threat to skyscrapers?

They won't take the building itself down, but let's just say that whoever owns the local glass shop is going to be a happy camper.

Have you ever been to Oklahoma City yourself. It is not "nuked" by tornadoes all the time like you imply. We've had a couple large ones, and all of you outside idiots think they happen daily. Most tornadoes are small, most Oklahomans have never seen one in their lives. Every city has its own natural disasters. For the record, Oklahoma has the largest casino in the world (https://www.gambling.com/us/online-casinos/strategy/the-7-la...) and that is in freaking Thackerville.

A tower like this is insanely expensive to build.

Housing density can largely be solved with multi-family units that are only 3 stories high. The majority of land-use in Oklahoma City is dedicated to single family houses on traditional plots.

You don't need a super skyscraper that's more than twice the height of the next tallest building in OK to address affordable housing.

This is what people need to understand. We don't need big flashy projects and skyscrapers. We need more missing middle multiplexes and townhouses. A lot of which could sprout up naturally if government wasn't restrictive in zoning and what folks can do with their own property (front yard businesses too)

This sort of work is not done by 'a city'

Matteson Capital and Thinkbox[0] are cited as the clients by the architect AO as listed in the article

Developers take a big swing sometimes, sometimes to get interest in their proposals ( the internet likes it, so my local counsel will have to approve it ), sometimes to get attention from other partners to do big projects together. This may be a portfolio piece, even if never completed as proposed here.

I don't know much about OKC but a certain musical theatre work has me very interested in the wind loading studies for this building.

[0] : https://www.aoarchitects.com/project/the-boardwalk-at-brickt...

Housing density is only one option in the toolkit to reduce real estate prices, and it's really only applicable to places HNers wanna live.

Hardly anybody on HN wants to live in "the sticks" and you can build houses there pretty cheaply.

Housing prices can almost always be solved by moving, but people don't want to do that.

(To be fair, they're usually talking about moving from single family homes to allowing small apartment buildings of 4-20 units, not moving from single family homes to towering skyscrapers.)

You are 100% spot on, I mentioned this in another comment I made and our housing crunch recently (past 8 years or so) is all due to human nature(and also a huge inflow of money). You can buy cheap houses in a majority of America but most people(on HN especially) want to live in superstar locations like SF bay area, coastal areas, mtn towns etc. Its a classic human nature problem and not a infrastructure problem. In addition you have trillions of dollars of money from venture and disrupted legacy industries(see tech giants bringing in hundreds of billions) flowing into these few places and people are surprised when an average house price in San Mateo county hits $1.8M!

I think the "song and dance" has an implicit "where needed", and Oklahoma is not suffering from the crowds, density, lack of house, and overpriced property values that have elicited that sentiment for other places, such as SF and other highly desirable places that have artificial barriers to housing development despite a need for it.

Except you need to build 'boring' 35-50 floor towers that are pre-designed and already have built versions of themselves. That way you can just buy the design and have a few people with prior experience building them to help out.

Not a unique tower that has never been built before, and will have an absurdly high price per square foot.

No one here is complaining about real estate prices in OKC

we need more housing density to combat high real estate prices.

Building 1800 units of luxury high rise homes costing millions per unit isn't how you combat high real estate prices.

Look at any skyscraper and you see that it's not merely an attempt to use space efficiently but rather to inspire awe.

In economic terms, a skyscraper tries to create, not merely to supply, the demand to live and work in it.

Many buildings are purely about inspiring awe (and creating demand), such as the Eiffel Tower, the St. Louis Arch and the Las Vegas Sphere.

There are tens of thousands of skyscrapers out there. Only fraction of them are awe-inspiring prestige projects, majority are most likely just pragmatic.

Eiffel Tower, the St. Louis Arch and the Las Vegas Sphere.

Yes, these are awe inspiring works of art --- not intended or designed to provide housing for people. In other words, not really comparable to the proposed OKC tower.

A building is not a unix command line tool. Any building has several functions, and inspiring awe is often one of them.

Skyscrapers also enable moderate density in car-dependent cities. If most people drive, you need more space for traffic and parking. That leaves less space for the city itself than in cities where most people use public transit. To achieve the same density, you have to build up.

Supertall skyscrapers are obviously prestige projects. But ordinary skyscrapers make sense in cities with a relatively small business district surrounded by low-density suburbs.

> I doubt it will ever be completed as proposed because most bankers/financers are likely to reach the same, rather obvious conclusion.

I agree, if I was a lender I wouldn’t extend $2-3B to build ~1800 housing units in Oklahoma City. At a $2.5B price tag, that’s $1.4M per unit. The financials don’t make sense.

Maybe if we were still in ZIRP, but the federal funds rate is currently 525-550 bps.

The amount of sniffy negativism on this site is absurd. The building certainly does look out of place in OKC but so what? If the local council and zoning procedures approve it, then maybe, just maybe the people of the city don't mind too much. We'll see. A tiny bit of a sense of wonder at a new supertall, even if it's in an unlikely location is more of what I'd have expected from a site filled by supposed tech enthusiasts. Bear in mind also, the NIMBY bullshit of places like SFO has nothing to do with any housing problems or lack of them in Oklahoma City.

> The amount of sniffy negativism on this site is absurd

I don't want to be monocausal, but a lot of this is simply Europeans spending time on this site and voicing opinions about American architecture.

It's well-understood that Europe doesn't build significant buildings anymore, and there's confusion about why a US city would want to build something large and noteworthy.

>> It's well-understood that Europe doesn't build significant buildings anymore, and there's confusion about why a US city would want to build something large and noteworthy.

That seems a little unfair. For example, Philharmonie de Paris, France; Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg; The Shard, London; MAAT Museum, Lisbon.

The Shard is the 47th largest building in the world. It's only notable in the absence of any other significant buildings in a nominally world-class city.

While I love supertall buildings, I don’t think height or size necessarily equates with notoriety, especially in a place like London.

Paris seems to do pretty OK on all of density, vibrancy, and aesthetics, while segregating all their somewhat-tall buildings to La Defense. I'm skeptical that moving all those into the city proper, let alone aiming for top-X-buildings slots, would improve the city in any way.

If the comment meant "tall" vs "significant," then granted. I think that, as a term of architectural art, "significant" means more than tall...

As a european, when I see this negativity, I see it as americans hating on each other, in this case blue state americans hating on a red state. Since HN doesn't have /pol/ style flags, I guess we'll never know.

I view it as less blue versus red and more class and culture clashes between states. I have blue friends in Texas that will get upset when a blue person from a coastal state says disparaging stuff about the whole state and its people.

You're allowed to have bad taste or do things like pain your house with leopard print or leave rusted cars in your front yard as decorations. Doesn't make it good.

In my tech-enthusiast mind I'm really interested in making peoples lives better so something that would instill some wonder in me would be something more like building Parisian boulevards, walkable, tree-line streets, and parks and such. Maybe even a train or bike lane. Something that would actually improve the livability of the city. An out of place skyscraper is just out of place. There's nothing particularly wonderful or interesting about it aside from how ridiculous it is. It reminds me of Dubai. Sadly, I thought we were trying to move past the Walmart-ization of the world.

> something more like building Parisian boulevards, walkable, tree-line streets, and parks and such. Maybe even a train or bike lane.

I've often wondered why a billionaire doesn't found a new city along those lines. There's a lot of very cheap land all around this vast country, and economic value creation isn't tied to geography as much as it used to be.

Heck, you don't even have to start one from scratch. I live in a midsize city away from the expensive coastal areas with a downtown that's full of potential. It wouldn't take a whole lot of money to truly revitalize it.

I find it very confusing as well. Then again it's also typically the same people who say if only you'd tax me more that would fix society's problems and then when you send them the link [1] so they can voluntarily do what they say they want to do they say no! not like that!.

A number of people complain about "billionaires" for being rich and whatnot. My biggest gripe with them is they're often unimaginative and have no taste.

[1] https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html

Most land is already zoned by local authorities, and their rezoning would also be controlled by said local authorities. This type of development is not legal in most of America’s zoned land.

Yep, and thankfully most downtown areas like the ones described by the person you are replying to are zoned for density and new development, and locally elected officials are very incentivized to increase their tax base and do good things for their local economy and so they're willing to work with developers on zoning updates, variances, and approvals.

There are no significant barriers for anyone who is motivated to build.

Problem in most housing constrained cities is 'downtown' is very small. As an example, only about 7% of residential Seattle land is zoned for multifamily, and that is an even smaller portion of the metropolitan area. That's not sufficient for a city that has grown by a third since 2000; and Seattle is considered a friendly city for such multifamily developments.

I agree that what is zoned for a city like Seattle isn't going to be representative of most American cities, and in particular the ones that the person I was replying to was talking about (mid-sized American cities away from the coasts).

Personally I'm less interested in Seattle, New York City, San Francisco, Washington DC, Chicago, etc. because the constraints there don't apply to Columbus, Pittsburgh, Grand Rapids, Oklahoma City, etc.

If you'd like to see for yourself, take a look at a satellite map of a city like Columbus and look at the downtown area. You'll find lots of vacant buildings (well you'd have to just know that so that doesn't really count), and surface parking lots that aren't used that often. If you compare that to Seattle you'll see a big difference.

Sounds like the California Forever project? https://californiaforever.com/

Planned cities always seem to get obsessed with far more "green space" than is needed, huge, useless plazas, and very-wide streets, which create miserable, too-spread-out spaces that never stop feeling sterile and wrong. There may be some exceptions, but that's the usual outcome.

There is Poundbury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury

It's not just out of place, it's extremely uneconomical for this area. Being against something massively inefficient is what I would expect from supposed tech enthusiasts.

You flatly don't know whether it's economical or not, you're just assuming it is, about a building that doesn't ven exist yet. The number of variables that can lead to a construction project ending up efficient or not, or economical or not, is too large for anyone to easily predict before a foundation is even laid down. Given the amount the developers presumably plan on investing in somethig this large, I'd assue they took a close look at economic viability.

public resources will inevitably be spent to support something which has no place in a city like OKC. OKR doesn't really have geologic boundaries which in turn means building out is cheaper than building up, and thus follows rent.

> If the local council and zoning procedures approve it, then maybe, just maybe the people of the city don't mind too much

How are these related? If people in OKC were polled and 90% of them said they didn't want the building in their community, do you think that would stop the building from being approved? That is not the typical relationship between developers, councils and zoning boards, and community members.

These laws are what dictates whether some construction project and its uses are allowed or not under the decisions made by the city's elected government. Thus, while these types of laws and municipal administrative details often have their many flaws and sources of corruption, they're at least the most plausible metric of local democracy at work. They're in any case much more valid than the dislike of some distant group of critics with no place in local politicas and demographics.

The price tag is easily $2-3B, it doesn’t make financial sense. I’d bet a significant amount of money it never gets built because nobody will finance it. It’s likely a portfolio design piece for the architect and developer, paid for with someone else’s money (OKC most likely).

>The amount of sniffy negativism on this site is absurd

Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I wonder if designers ever watched How I Met Your Mother

Soon to be empty tower... like all the recent skyscrappers. Just look at China struggling to fill theirs in so-called economical hotspots. You must be crazy to believe Oklahoma is a major business center these days.

I think China's difficulties stem from an excessive speculative bubble in real estate, based on the notion/hope that manufacturing and technology industries would continue high rates of growth.

Oklahoma's main economic basis is oil and gas, plus some agricultural and manufacturing, which doesn't seem to justify a massive investment in corporate office space, especially in a city that is so spread out that working from home is a strong argument over driving 20 miles to work.

But, maybe they're betting that oil and gas will make a rebound if there's a change in government in November, who knows.

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