The Rise of the Mile-High Building | Hacker News Reader

The Rise of the Mile-High Building

nymag.com

36 pointsHooke21 comments

I've been wondering why you couldn't have elevators built on the principles of being vertical trams. They would be run on tracks rather than cables and several could run in a single shaft in the same direction. Any experts know why this isn't done (I'm sure someone's thought of it already). I suppose synchronizing the movements might be a challenge.

The problems of ordinary elevators are serious for large buildings - without express elevators, an ordinary elevators can take up a large percentage of the floor space of a large building. Even with express elevators, the space used is significant (I recall 25% for the old World Trade Center towers).

Having cables for the elevators means that they can have counterweights, which I assume greatly decreases the amount of energy needed to raise and safely lower them.

There's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-deck_elevator

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-05/cablefree-...

I wonder how the higher floors would be in a building like that? I'm on the 97th of the Sears Tower, and there are days when it is rather uncomfortable as the building sways. Are the newer buildings, with mass dampers, immune to this?

I've been to the observation deck several times, but I've never experienced the sway. What's it like? How are you not terrified? All I would be thinking about is the building toppling over, especially after 9/11.

It is only noticeable on very windy days. Not terrifying at all, but a little uncomfortable at times. On a really bad day, you can end up feeling a bit sea sick.

Apple should have built this in Cupertino instead of that horrible spaceship monstrosity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Tower. It would have been a lot cheaper, too.

Most things are cheaper when you're not paying first-world labor costs.

Especially when the labor consists of indentured servants.

~~indentured servants~~ Or slaves (sigh. I really don't want that world cup to happen in Qatar. Related to the post because Gulf countries can afford tall buildings because they can morally afford slavery.)

"By welcoming migrant workers, the UAE and its neighbor Qatar do more than any other rich country to reduce global inequality." http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120179/how-reduce-global-...

A carpenter from Local 22 (Bay area) will cost a company $70+/hr. http://local22.org/2014_carpenter1.jpg

Damn I should have gone into carpentry.

If you check the numbers in the link (or alternatively use common sense), you'd realize that the carpenter doesn't actually see a good chunk of that money.

The wages are listed as $40/hour, which turns out to $80k/year before taxes, which in the peninsula is not exactly a ton of cash.

Unfortunately, the Valley is still obsessed with sprawling, inefficient campuses. I'd love to see Google build a good height building -- 50+ stories -- on the land they're buying up in north Sunnyvale, but the chances of that happening are unfortunately slim to none.

Harder to make it earthquake-resistant.

Tokyo has just as many, if not more, earthquakes, and that doesn't stop them from making skyscrapers.

Hard means expensive and it wouldn't be much better than inefficient campuses

could you use a gyroscope at the top of a building to keep it stable?

Modern skyscrapers basically do this, with giant tanks of water at the top that gets pumped around to act as a dampener.

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