Oklahoma Stakes Its Claim to the Tallest Building in the U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Oklahoma Stakes Its Claim to the Tallest Building in the U.S.

nytimes.com

Out of curiosity, I checked: at 1907 feet, this would make this building significantly (~2.3x) taller than the next tallest building in Oklahoma City[1], which in turn is significantly taller than the third tallest building in the state[2]. So this will probably end up looking very silly, if it gets built.

Edit: and to complete the picture, the second-tallest (would-be third) building in Oklahoma City is explicitly modeled after WTC 1.

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

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOK_Tower

FYI, BOK tower is in Tulsa, not OKC. It is a bit strange to look at it in person with the WTC connection.

> at least one hotel and more than 1,000 luxury apartments

there's a good reason the burj khalifa has office space above the hotel and residents. no one wants to sleep with that swaying.

can't be fun to work in that either

agreed, but at least you have a distraction

I didn't notice it when I worked in WTC2 except on very windy days. But I was only on the 15th floor. I don't recall noticing it in the Empire State Building when I was on the 52nd floor. Neither the old WTC nor the ESB have a tuned mass damper to cut down on the swaying.

> Legends Tower will be part of Boardwalk at Bricktown, a mixed-use development comprising four new buildings. The first phase of its construction will include a hotel and two smaller residential towers; the second phase, which will include the supertall building, is estimated to begin in two or three years. Rob Budetti, a managing partner of AO, told City Council members on Tuesday that he expected the entire complex to be completed in about five years.

We'll see if this actually gets built, of course--it's almost certainly a money-losing effort, for the reasons many people have noted. Either the developers are engaged in wishful thinking, or they are willing to take a financial loss for other reasons.

Or, as it usually is, it's fraud.

One of the most land surface rich places in the US, and they build up.

This will never be completed

What is wrong with building up? It's the right thing to do environmentally. Should Oklahoma City just become another Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio where suburban sprawl is the name of the game?

I think there's quite a difference between simply "building up" and building the tallest building in the country

Look up what urban planners call “the missing middle.” Amsterdam, Paris, and even Washington, DC get their high density from 5-6 story buildings. You don’t need skyscrapers to have a bustling, walkable city.

Now, I actually like skyscrapers! I think they’re cool. But this one makes zero sense. A 1900 foot skyscraper surrounded by Oklahoma has strong king of sh** mountain vibes. The whole appeal is that it makes no sense. It’s that onion article about Boston, so cute, they’re pretending to be a real city! But for oil barons.

They could’ve built a hundred five-over-1s in a mixed use, transit oriented development instead of this, and it would’ve been a lot better for everyone involved.

Well, that would certainly be unique for a place like that. Let's see if it actually gets built.

If there was a prediction market with a bet referencing whether this is built or not in the next 10 years, I would bet heavily against it. This is a $2-3B building, in a metropolitan area of 1.5M people. Finding financing is going to be tricky.

Class A office towers are selling for fractions of their former valuations ($50/sqft) in the metro area I live in which has 2.5x as many people as the OKC area.

If it is built, I think it’ll end up like the Palice of the Parliament/People’s Palace in Bucharest: massively oversized and 70% empty.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_Parliament

To clarify "$2-3B" nominal estimated cost means an expected $20-30B final cost

How do you figure? E.g. One World Trade Center had a nominal cost of $3B and a final cost of $3.9B so why would this run 20x-30x more over estimate?

Why would someone want to live in that thing and deal with elevators and congestion when land is cheap?

Building up in Manhattan makes sense, economically speaking. Oklahoma, not so much

Cheap land and no reason whatsoever to want or need to be there (see: cheap land).

How on earth did they find investors?

This seems…odd.

What’s the economic case for building a supertall building in a fourth-tier city in flat terrain like this?

Rich fools who need to be parted from their money?

You make a great point, and I think in situations like this, it’s an indication you should look for non-economic reasons that the plan is discussed.

Maybe the developer is currying some sort of political favor. Maybe there is some other side reason that is harder to imagine.

Who knows how much bullshit it is, but I saw in some recent discourse that Elon Musk started the hyper loop and boring companies as a way to fight rail expansion. It was never his intention to deliver on the promise of those things, but if they sounded borderline plausible, they could be used to derail train projects.

Definitely not an expert, but isn't Oklahoma a bit on the seismically active side to be building uber-tall buildings?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_earthquake_swarms_(20...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2017_Oklahoma_seismic_haz...

Many of the world's tallest buildings are in areas with more frequent and much more severe earthquakes. It comes down to whether or not the building is designed with earthquakes in mind more than whether earthquakes occur.

And the tornadoes?

The closest we've seen is either when an F3 tornado hit the Bank One Tower in Fort Worth or typhoons hitting larger buildings elsewhere but with slower winds. A strong tornado causes the building to pretty much be a total loss without extensive renovation (as is typical with a strong direct hit by a tornado) but not in a "Wizard of Oz House Flying through the sky" way rather a "the floors all get blown out and ruined as the wind passes through" way.

And that's just a 35 floor office building that is about 400 feet high. This is five times that height, and right smack in the most tornado-dense area of the country.

Insane.

I mean if you've ever seen a tornado risk map you're basically concluding half the US would be insane to develop just from tornado risk alone https://i.imgur.com/3enPH8r.png Combine that with all natural hazards and I guess we're all moving to MI, OH, PA, and some of the northeast?

Also not really sure how height plays into it. Either you have x floorspace of development in a region or you don't. How high you do/don't stack it isn't related to risk in that region in any way.

The more floors, the bigger the loss will be.

Larger buildings are usually pretty good at handling seismic activity. When I was growing up in California they taught this in the occasional earthquake safety classes. Parking structures though are HORRIBLE. They fold up like an accordion.

And then there's tornadoes. How compatible are uber-tall buildings with those kind of storms?

I don't know about uber-tall, but Bank One Tower was a 35 story office building in Ft. Worth Texas that was hit by an F3 tornado in 2000. Plenty of broken glass (https://dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v...) but it survived. They were originally going to tear it down after the tornado but instead converted it to residential.

They were worried about demolishing a building with that much asbestos. According to Wikipedia if they had demolished it, it would have been "the 5th tallest building in the world to be demolished".

Earthquakes are not a problem for tall buildings. The resonant frequencies created by an earthquake that cause maximum damage as a function of height typically are centered around much shorter buildings. Hence why you will find very tall buildings in many areas with strong seismic activity, it is routine engineering.

How is this even economical?

Supertall buildings are usually in already super-dense downtown areas where the economics can support the more expensive supertall building because space is at a premium.

Space is not at that kind of a premium in Oklahoma City. The current tallest building is the 50-story Devon Tower at 844 feet. This new skyscraper would be more than twice that.

And if you look at the renderings, it's surrounded by buildings that are mostly five stories tall.

I mean... huh? It doesn't make any sense.

Let them have some excitement, God knows Tulsans need it

This is in OKC, not Tulsa. Tulsans have plenty excitement with the opening of the atrociously bacteria infected Zink Lake running through the middle of the city: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/d1473cd55d8d40e48c4...

The reason for building this is likely similar to why those ultra-thin buildings get built in new york. I don't know all the reasons, but there is a lot of one-upmanship with these ultra-ultra rich people that don't know what to do with all their money.

I heard about this on NPR the other day and immediately thought of the Skyscraper Index. Self-fulfilling prophecy, financial divination or not statistically relevant?

You can probably see Kansas from the top...

Distance to horizon from the full 1905 feet (observation would be lower based on the design picture) would only get about half the way.

It might light up clouds above Tulsa in the evening, maybe you'll see those.

1907*

> As a matter of philosophy, I generally don’t believe in height restrictions, so I will vote for the request,” Mayor David Holt said in an email.

As a YIMBY I would love to form an alliance with the libertarians for building new housing.

I’m hoping this tower has a better fate than the Jeddah Tower or the infamous LA Graffiti Tower (an official art gallery according to Google Maps).

Supposedly construction restarted last month on the Jeddah Tower: https://www.newsweek.com/jeddah-tower-saudi-arabia-construct...

I give that one decent odds on being built. Certainly much better than this one in Oklahoma.

non paywalled local news alternative for the cheap and lazy: https://www.kosu.org/local-news/2024-05-28/plans-for-nations...

Inb4 first skyscraper to be demolished by tornado!

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