Frank Lloyd Wright's mile high skyscraper proposal (2021)
onverticality.com
onverticality.com
Parks need a certain level of activation, and developments like these tended to fall below those thresholds. If not active, parks become ill-maintained, desolate, and foreboding. In the worst case scenario, they become havens for crime, since there are no witnesses or bystanders to help out someone getting mugged.
Parkland that is not often used to capacity that has a lot of people near it would likely have more crime, because you’ve essentially created a glorified alleyway. E.G. Central Park in the 70s, when you didn’t want to be nearby it near sundown.
Central Park is a good case study of this phenomenon, because it’s now one of the most heavily used parks in one of most densely populated areas in the world, and billionaires pay premiums to live next to it. That didn’t always used to be the case, and it was considered dangerous.
1. A low traffic urban park still has some traffic, and criminals want reasonable waiting times. You might wait all day on a hiking trail.
2. Escape routes. Harder to make a clean getaway on a trail. Often one way out, a single trail head, and then a drive. That's another thing, you probably need a car. In an urban park you can vanish back into the city from multiple exit points.
3. Crimes of opportunity. Most muggings aren't planned out far in advance. Driving to a hiking spot and patiently waiting isn't the psychological place typical criminals are operating from. Serial killers, maybe... and sometimes those killings do happen in secluded hiking areas.
I've travelled and hiked in the US a lot. In outdoor tourism spots away from cities, I think the main threat for opportunistic thefts would be 20-30yo foreign tourists (shoestring travelling Europeans, South Americans, etc). Cities would be completely different.
Near me, sometimes people report smash and grabs through car windows at trailheads.
To put it another way, hundreds of miles of forest trails sounds like a lot of work.
but i'd assume that the main difference is that the hundreds of miles of trails and national forest behind your house doesn't have a residential tower stuck in the middle of it.
but afaik the difference between "commieblocks" and towers in the park is that there was a lot less park per commieblock. you had more buildings clustered tighter together than the prototypical western towers in the park development.
but also, it is an artifact of the political system: crime shot up after the dissolution of the USSR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_Soviet_Union
A city park is within walking distance, requires no vehicle to get to, can be visited on a whim, and potential victims are more likely carrying valuables (jewelry, electronics, nice handbags). Criminals can visit the park, commit a crime, and disappear back into the dense city on a whim, without planning or preparing.
Most crimes in this context are crimes of convenience. Hiking long trails is not convenient.
The other thing is that people visit their local, convenient parks unless there is a really good reason to travel far for one; and if everyone has their tower in a park, then why would they go to anyone else’s?
Back when I was a daily hiker, I would have been carry seriously expensive gear. A few thousand dollars at least. Way more expensive than I would have walking around town. It would have been work to track me down in the forest though.
As one of the other commenters pointed out, in a national forest the crime occurs as car clouting at the trailhead. I would leave my car unlocked, and depending on weather, a window rolled down.
The parent poster must live next to a different national forest than the ones I hiked at, if you hiked at a popular trail it was completely normal to get back to the trailhead and see cars with their windows busted out.
I can see thousands of examples of “tower in a park” style residential neighborhoods online in dozens of different countries. Are they all fake?
who said they were fake? I just said the reality often didn't pan out that well.
The question is about whether you believe they are fake or not. I don’t have any claims in either direction.
e.g. “Didn’t pan out that well” according to what authoratative sources?
You can’t get around it via linking a wikipedia article with opinions expressed by other random people, without any more authority or credibility than many HN users.
Edit: And if there is no source with such, then it needs to be proven via logical arguments, observational evidence, etc.
Anything that user writes in the future will automatically supersede it.
And your opinion about the interpretation of someone else’s comment can never outweigh anyone else’s opinion on the same… so it seems empty of any substance.
A giant tower in a park just encapsulates everyone and leaves the park empty.
Easily observable and any why the campus model took root.
It’s also not that safe and requires its own police precinct.
In short the park is too large compared to everything else and so it isn't enough of a draw for locals to keep out the rif-raf.
Note that I said drive, not take transit above. Although the density might be there, the sky scrapper in the park ends up acting like a cul-de-sac: all transit has to make long detours to get to each one and so the effective speed of transit is unacceptably slow for any trip thus forcing people to drive just to get a reasonable trip time.
The thing about the tower in the park ethos was that every building should be surrounded by park and the neighborhood should be more park than city. That’s way too low of a density to keep parks safe.
Towers surrounding a park, like Central Park in New York (or any decent size park in Manhattan) works well. Towers as a city wall like Grant Park in Chicago also work well. In both cases the park is a focal point of the urban form which puts all attention on the communal area it represents.
The purpose of "towers in a park" was to break up the urban form, and have density without urbanism. One big problem they were trying to avoid is rooms where the "view" out the window was of a ventilation shaft between buildings. They wanted towers with "no such thing as a bad view" by positioning them in a staggered layout and with substantial setbacks. This creates a bunch of awkward negative spaces in the layout and the architect just stamps "park" on all the vacant areas.
The result might be good views from inside the buildings but the no-man's-land between them becomes an alienating place with broken sight lines and blind corners. Toss in a criminal element and you end up with some really unpleasant spaces.
It originates with Le Corbusier and his Radiant City concept from the 1930s. See https://99percentinvisible.org/article/ville-radieuse-le-cor.... The influences quickly spread through Europe and North America before exploding everywhere post WWII. There are several Wikipedia pages about Le Corbusiers, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville_Radieuse but in a simple search I couldn't find one that gives a good overview of how influential it actually was. A lot academic urban planning literature discusses it. OTOH, the idea of less crowding long predated Le Corbusiers, and his vision may have been inevitable, but it was Le Corbusiers who packaged it up into a comprehensive concept, which helped the practice to spread much more rapidly and uniformly around the world.
Japan has plenty of those (e.g. Roppongi's Midtown, Tokyo Tower, Shinagawa's corp. park)
I'm sitting at my desk in an office in Gastown in a low-rise. The streets are covered in feces and broken crack pipes.
Parking garages in these developments also tended to be centers of crime since they were big, desolate, and no one lingered in them to witness anything.
[1] https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/26/a4/cb/8f/...
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ftdtd2WhghdcYV9R7
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/frank-lloyd-wright-spire
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeddah_Tower#:~:text=Jedda...
[0] https://www.zawya.com/en/projects/construction/kingdom-holdi...
What about what me might call the "Barcelona" style? Or many other EU cities full of approximately six-story residential buildings with small shops on the ground floor. The style is relatively dense, with mass-transit systems and low private car ownership rates. But no need for skyscrapers. (There are some skyscrapers, but they're not key elements of the residential plan).
Although I don't care much about most tall buildings, I do like that blogs on single, weird topics still exist and are being written. Niche blogs are one of the best uses cases for the web.
Couldn't a smaller number of shafts move a greater amount of people using one-way traffic, paternoster-style?
We're slowly starting to see elevators without cables, and this will probably influence tall buildings in the coming decades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJLlXwVLDH0
That’s only true if you plan for getting about everybody into and out of the building every day, at ground level.
There are some ‘designs’ (rather: rough ideas, typically in science fiction, and often dystopian) that let go of that constraint (think flying cars landing on balconies or enormous buildings where people mostly live and work on a few floors of an enormous building)
> ... rough ideas, typically in science fiction, ...
Vs. in the real world: Fire Codes
Fun story, Wright despised the electrification of the rural US, and threatened to abandon the property when poles were erected nearby, considering them unsightly.
And removed a load bearing wall from his sister's house and didn't replace it.
He's not my favorite architect by a long way. And I find the idea of him being in charge of a mile tall building to be horrifying.
People kissing his ass and he can’t even make a fucking roof work.
This is another in a long line of things my father and I disagree about. (It was his idea to take the tour)
When I start I don’t know if its beams or walls or trusses or tensile fabric. I don’t know where the water comes from. I don’t know where it goes because I don’t know the shapes of things. Don’t know the form of the whole.
Sometimes computers are appropriate to the work. Sometimes they are not. I started learning CAD in 1989. My understanding of the work is different now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouverism - many advantages to tall dense development. Especially stupid are his comments about how suburbia is supposedly better for kids even though they have nothing to do and rely on their parents to be driven to every activity. All based entirely on his made up anecdote.
People are less lonely in dense cities than they are in suburbs.
Alexander isn’t making arguments about economic efficiency, but about what’s good for the human animal. I’d be curious what data you have to disprove this.
Now, if you’re talking about his specific claims like “the higher you are in a building the crazier you get,” yeah, I don’t think much of that supposed data is useful.
That's a USofAian "suburb" .. not a well designed suburb.
There are many types of "dense", ranging from all skyscrapers, through (say) dense row housing with much open space, to big single house blocks everywhere (arguably the worst form).
Elsewhere in the world suburbs are surrounded by green belts and have embedded parks, footpaths and cycleways, shops, etc that are reachable without cars.
Better to just say 'American', FYI. It's much clearer and the ambiguity you are trying to avoid doesn't exist.
It's generally white people thinking they are solving a problem, honestly. Even if some people don't like that 'America' tends to refer to the US rather than something general to the continent or one or both of the continents, it doesn't really matter - there is never any ambiguity. The contexts talking about something the US is doing vs the continents are pretty much always crystal clear.
Oh but you can basically guarantee there's an inner eye roll everytime you call yourself Americano. Estadounidense works, as Estados Unidos Mexicanos is largely not in use, and Mexicano(a) is the prefered term.
It's not a different mental model, it's just a mis translation. In Spanish saying "soy Americano" translates to 'I am from the Americas'. That's why the preference is to just use Estadounidense. It effectively means that US people are wrong if they say 'soy Americano' in Spanish, and Latin Americans are wrong for saying 'I am American' is wrong in english.
I'm even entirely open to gentle, friendly correction. I've gotten this in France; it was said with a smile, not a snarl, so I appreciated it.
Like I said, nobody got in my face about it.
If you don’t want to say “American”, you could use Usonian, a term coined by Lloyd Wright himself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usonia
I'm happy with US citizen, USian, USofAian, etc, I've used all of them since pre WWW Usenet days.
It's interesting how some like to regulate the language of others.
USofAian is almost unreadable and unrecognizable in text to the general public when compared with American.
And no, in answer to your deleted replies, I'm not American, just someone that doesn't like seeing ambiguity created unnecessarily or misinformation spread, but I see now you were doing it more for stylistic reasons.
Obviously.
> I guess it was just a way to stand out?
No.
> Express some personality with a bit of semantic flair?
Again, no.
> I get that.
Do you have examples of semantic flair that you use to stand out?
> just someone that doesn't like seeing ambiguity created unnecessarily
What ambiguity? Which other citizens of which other country did you honestly think I was referring to?
> or misinformation spread,
What misinfomation? I honestly and in good faith have no idea what "misinformation" you are referring to.
> but I see now you were doing it more for stylistic reasons.
For the third time. No.
Stop trying to make your contextual PoV a thing Gretchen.
This is literally no more than a useful contraction of "United States of America citizen"
Yup. Should be obvious most people would share my stance also.
> Again, no.
Hmm. So why, then?
> Do you have examples of semantic flair that you use to stand out?
I don't try to stand out by being contrarian or via other semantic scheming.
> What ambiguity?
> What misinfomation?
It's confusing to at the least ESL speakers who may think it is a reasonable way to refer to people from the US and it is misinformation to suggest it is.
> For the third time. No.
Hmm.
> Stop trying to make your contextual PoV a thing Gretchen.
Not sure what Gretchen refers to, but I was just trying to assume good faith and that was the only reason I could muster. I look forward to your clarification.
> This is literally no more than a useful contraction of "United States of America citizen"
It's not useful, though - it's harmful. It creates ambiguity where this is none, and tries to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
Yes. Most people like you share your point of view. Odd that.
> So why, then?
Check your hoistory, that appears to be the first time you haven't weighed in with nothing but your PoV, preconception, and desire to impose your conclusions as the motivations of others.
Congratulations. You're evolving.
> I don't try to stand out by being contrarian or via other semantic scheming.
But you assume others do? And that makes sense to you. Okay ...
> It's confusing to at the least ESL speakers ...
Is it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42969214 suggest that not all ESL folk think that way.
> but I was just trying to assume good faith
There's been no sign of good faith and assuming the best from your comments since the first one (that appears edited) that patronisingly informed me that I should conform to your way of writing English.
> It's not useful, though - it's harmful.
Who is bleeding?
> It creates ambiguity
Again, what ambiguity? What country did you think that I was referring to?
You seem to have modified my statement and then taken something other than intended. Allow me to clarify. I was referring to most people as in the vast majority of the English speaking population. Not simply people like me.
> Check your hoistory, that appears to be the first time you haven't weighed in with nothing but your PoV, preconception, and desire to impose your conclusions as the motivations of others.
> Congratulations. You're evolving.
This was the answer you gave in response to my asking why you chose to use an obscure less common less well known term to refer to people of the US. All you could do is insult me in response. This leads me to believe I was correct in my previous good faith assumption.
Also, having to check post history so you can attempt to discredit me instead of just answering a simple question says a lot.
> But you assume others do? And that makes sense to you. Okay ...
As I said, it was the only good faith assumption I could come up with as to why someone would chose to use an obscure less common less well known term to refer to people from the US.
> Is it?
Without a doubt, due to being significantly less used and recognized.
> There's been no sign of good faith and assuming the best from your comments since the first one (that appears edited) that patronisingly informed me that I should conform to your way of writing English.
It wasn't patronizing, it was informing you that that term is less common and tries to solve a problem that doesn't exist. My reply was a lost gamble taking the chance you were someone that ran into someone like spreading nonsense and having picked up a bad term/habit as a result, as opposed to being someone that just likes being contrarian and causes people to pick up said bad terms/habits.
> Who is bleeding?
Is drawing blood really what you limit your concept of harm to?
> Again, what ambiguity?
This was clarified in my previous reply, as were other answers to questions you repeated, but I'll repeat myself again here while continuing to assume good faith.
The ambiguity is in giving the impression that it's a valid term to refer to people from the US, when really it's not so it just creates undue confusion and ambiguity.
“USian” could apply to Mexico as they’re the United States, too, and since they’re in America they could also be “USofAians”.
That's a stretch, the country they live in is United Mexican States which doesn't abbreviate to USofA.
Mexico in short doesn't have the ambiguity of America.
No one is trying to regulate anything lol, you're as free to use whatever non-standard terms or words you like, you can even use irregardless if it's your hearts desire to do so.
You just have to keep in mind that people using a silly term to make a silly point ultimately just end up making themselves look silly. Using a term like 'USofAian' is certainly a silly term since it tries to solve a problem that doesn't exist, and actually creates instances of the problem trying to be avoided.
> And finally, don't take the four-story limit too literally. Occasional exceptions from the general rule are very important - High Places (62)
You can archive considerable density without skyscrapers. In fact we've been building vibrant, walkable cities without skyscrapers for most of history.
> Man in his upended street must know he is becoming a mere numerical item of convenience; on the way to being a thing. His inherent instinct for love and beauty is not only becoming suspect but, in spite of all intent, useless to society. He sees the human creature atrophy as he sees poverty of imagination in much "modern art," so-called. But it was Walt Whitman himself who raised the perpendicular hand to declare: "It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary." This is what is now coming forth in our architecture as in our life. ― Frank Lloyd Wright, A Testament
> The last few millions of the human race are gathered together in the Last Redoubt, a gigantic metal pyramid, nearly eight miles high, which is under siege from unknown forces and Powers outside in the dark.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Land
1:https://web.archive.org/web/20090524012412/http://www.thenig...
I was amazed when I noticed enclaves of rich govt workers in northern VA that have stupid expensive communities but are all on septic tanks and well water.
Again though this depends on where you live. In some places filter raw sewage through 2 cm of dirt and it is safe to drink - in other places raw sewage will travel miles. Likewise some places have plenty of safe water, other places have little water and still other places the water isn't safe to drink.
From 2009. A year before Burj Khalifa opened. It is truly legendary.
Love it
Car owners could (say) use outlying parking towers.
To travel there are buses, trains, aircraft, boats, etc.
Not owning a car is common in many parts of the world.
Are you claiming that an occasional need for a car dictates that every person needs their own dedicated full time car and that all dwellings need associated parking?
That would be extremely foolish.
You appear to be flopping about in circles here.
Most Seattleites have a driver’s license. Most Manhattanites do not. Residential skyscrapers probably don’t make sense for most of Seattle.
In case you're being serious, you rent a car or take an Uber. A metropolis might as well be defined by its lack of car ownership.
Even when you're renting or being driven, you go as far as you can via train. (The Metro-North goes to an Appalachian trailhead [1].) It's safer, simpler, cheaper and nobody has the deadweight loss of being unpaid chauffeur.
Not a car that's exclusive to one person though.
You're delibrately overlooking that part and that doesn't reflect well on you.
Straw man. We were debating dedicated parking.
> so you do need a car after all. It's really amusing listening to people from the Bay Area
The Bay Area is car centric--most people have a driver's license. I live in Wyoming and lived in New York. You need a car in Wyoming. You don't in Manhattan. High rises make sense in the latter. They'd be stupid here.
If you're dense enough to make high rises necessary, you're too dense for cars to make sense. Parking for high rises is a dead giveaway the project is being pursued for appearances. (San Francisco's skyscrapers are dominated by commercial buildings that double as advertising.)
Most Americans don't live in a skyrise. If you love your car and only have one, buy a place in Brooklyn with a garage: city living is not for you.
Wide open places like US and Canada sure but many places are super crowded. Southern China, Lagos Nigeria, Tokyo, Mexico City. They're all implementing trains for a reason. There is just no way for cars to move if packed into a small area with hundreds of thousands of people.
This isn't a matter of practicality but economics. The penthouse collectors don't need parking. A high rise with parking is practically screaming that it's a vanity project--the economics that demand a high rise don't work if you have to add dead space for cars. The math only balances if your building is entirely penthouses and valet space for sports cars.
I can't hear Blade's birds at their East River heliport on 30th Street in Manhattan from my friend's apartment in Hudson Yards. The noise is mostly at street level. Not in an apartment with a modicum of thought to acoustics.
Obviously it won't work in the other direction, and you'll need to bring your hang-glider back up, but hang-gliders are pretty light and that's a very solvable problem.
And, if anyone is a structural engineer - would the taproot foundation actually work for such a high structure?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia
"The Line (stylised THE LINE; Arabic: ذا لاين) is a conceptual linear smart city in Saudi Arabia in Neom, Tabuk Province, housed in a single building, that is designed to have no cars, streets or carbon emissions.[2][3] The original plans called for the city to span 170 kilometres (110 mi) at a height of 500 m (1,600 ft)[4] and a width of 200 metres (660 ft) sized to accommodate a population of 9 million"
My personal pet dream, if i had a sufficient number of billions, - several large, like that Wright's, skyscrapers 30+ km into the ocean off the SF Ocean Beach (the depth there is like 50-80m, so sub-1M tons of concrete and steel would give you a 100m-side square foundation with 10m walls, and such foundation itself already can house 10-20 underwater stories)
> From just a security perspective
The Line is in Tabuk Province, Saudi Arabia's northwest projection against Jordan, Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. It's within proven bombing range of several regional terrorist groups, including some with explicit antagonism against the KSA, e.g. the Houthis. Put simply, it's a megaproject that strongly depends on borders staying put and low-boil militancies at a simmer.