The Relationship Between Skyscrapers and Great Cities | Hacker News Reader

The Relationship Between Skyscrapers and Great Cities

citylab.com

84 pointsmisnamed32 comments

Equating skyscrapers only with supertalls (200m+) is pretty misleading. For example, both Sydney and Singapore are currently experiencing massive skyscraper booms, but they don't appear on the charts because they're "only" in the 150m range.

Also, the "cities" are poorly defined. Tangerang is a suburb of Jakarta and should be counted as such, while Mandaluyong is in Manila. I suspect the same applies to a number of those Chinese cities.

It is odd picking that metric. Those are exceptionally tall buildings.

For example, somehow one of the largest cities in the world, São Paulo, didn't even make the list despite having an outrageous number of tall buildings: http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/2169111.jpg

Where's Tokyo? Hong Kong? I'm confused why these were omitted.

> Where's Tokyo? Hong Kong?

The graphs are for new completions, which almost by definition favours developing countries. Evidently Tokyo and HK didn't complete any 200m+ buildings in 2015. And while São Paulo has a very impressive concentration of tall buildings, it has zero above 200m.

I agree about 200m+ buildings being a strange metric, though. For all intents and purposes there's little difference, from an urban dynamics perspective, between 150m and 200m construction.

There are many cities where building a 200m+ building is impractical, ridiculous, or totally out of character, yet these cities are highly dense, and by any definition, "great" cities.

I'm really confused as to why they'd pick this particular metric. Later on in the article they talk about density patterns which is a much better predictor of health.

  150 meters 
   = 45 floors 
     @ 10 feet / story

I guess that's a large building to enter and experience as a human space, but how does it affect the skyline?

If the horizon crests at ~25 miles at sea level here on earth, what's the distance from which it can be seen. I think that's a relevant measure for the effect of a building on its surrounding community.

In Hong Kong, most apartment buildings built in the last 15 years are about that height or taller. New commercial buildings are often double that.

Though your measure of effect on the surrounding community wouldn't really apply here as the buildings aren't that tall when compared to surrounding mountains.

I agree. That particular horizon figure is the only one I know off the top of my head, due to reading up on naval ballistics. Hence the remark about sea level.

Anything else requires some napkin math about the circumfrence of the earth and radial offsets for non-sea-level terrain, combine with a bit of triangulation, to estimate skyline impact. Then, heaped on top is the effects of local topography contours and relative relationships with other human structures.

> Tangerang is a suburb of Jakarta

No it's not? It's true that the cities are basically connected by urban sprawl, but administratively it's definitely a separate entity.

A case could be made that it's part of Greater Jakarta but that's a pandora's box of definitions and interpretations...

Tangerang is the "ta" in Jabodetabek, which for all practical purposes is a single massive conglomeration.

https://goo.gl/maps/CAHXuiCDtQw

It's surprising to see Boston this high on the list despite the insurmountable limits it faces building upward:

1) The Logan height restriction that much of downtown faces due to the airport's proximity:

https://www.massport.com/media/11778/BOS_COMPOSITE_Ver2pt0_d...

2) The city's most desirable neighborhoods (Back Bay, Beacon Hill, South End, Charlestown Navy Yard) are protected as historical districts:

http://boston.maps.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap...

3) The overall NIMBY attitude toward new development (surmountable yet heavily suppressed by nearly 400 years of it):

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/04/23/boston-storied-...

That said, there are somehow 5 in the pipeline at 600+ feet:

http://boston.curbed.com/maps/boston-tallest-buildings

I don't think this is a comprehensive list of American cities. I think they just sampled 12 cities for their data.

It's because the city of Boston is only a small part of the Boston Metro area and doesn't include the suburbs that were annexed into other cities.

NIMBY? The city of boston has been a construction zone for twenty years.

Much of it has to do with the preposterous price of real estate and pent up demand in Boston. Finding a condo anywhere near a transit station 20 minutes out will cost you north of 400K. 10 minutes and you're looking at 600K.

Sounds like a bargain compared to some other cities.

Urban demand is at record levels. San Francisco's prices are basically nonsensical at this point.

The history of tall buildings is that of huge egos. Sure, market forces cause rational developers to build more density when land prices are high... but not skyscraper high. The risk is too significant. The existence of these monoliths, in my opinion, is best explained by psychology, not standard economics.

Can any economist here explain why skyscrapers are a bad idea?

Not an economist, but it's said in the article, skyscrapers tend to be expensive per "m2 of usable floor space". One reason for this is purely mechanical, the building must be much sturdier in order carry its weight. Also, a bigger fraction of the interior space is taken up by elevator shafts. Both of these contribute to lower usable floor space and thus higher expense.

Then there's also the question of the environment of the building, roads/mass transit/etc. also place a limit on how high the density in an area can be.

IIRC some of the highest density urban areas (in the developed world) are not terribly high, e.g. city centres like Paris or Barcelona where buildings are ~10 stories or so.

Comparing cities is very tricky because different cities governments cover different things, think Minneapolis and St. Paul or Boston which didn't annex many of it's suburbs compared to cities like Chicago or New York hence why it has such a high building hight, because a real comparison would include Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Quincy, Newton and other jurisdictions that are part of the core city.

I am surprised they left out Houston, which has the most urban sprawl of any US city. There's tons of construction going on in the city as well. But for the lack of zoning laws, Houston would be a larger city than NYC.

Not that I would suggest other cities copy Houston's (lack of) urban planning, but leaving out such a singular example seems strange. Especially since they included Austin.

>But for the lack of zoning laws, Houston would be a larger city than NYC.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Can you explain?

One example of being too flat is Mesa, Arizona.

Huge horizontal buildings would be pretty neat if they used high-speed express tramways in a manner similar to elevators, but only provided walk-up access to maybe 5 floors, maximum.

I know this is focusing on details, but there is no Ann Arbor, WI. The article copied over the typo from the study. Confusing.

I wish the study explained why they chose the 12 cities they did.

Also their populations do not match the census like they say they do, I am left to question any validity this study has.

They also claim the Empire State building is the tallest in NYC, which hasn't been true since 2012, when One World Trade surpassed it.

"A data center was burned to the ground after misplacing Ann Arbor, Michigan in Wisconsin. Reports say that 'Hail to the Victors' could be heard in the distance, along with murmuring about how 'Wisconsin isn't really hand-shaped'."

(Satire)

> These areas boast an abundance of mid-rise, open-floor plan, historic buildings that create street-level interaction, where people and ideas can combine and recombine to form new innovations and startup companies.

Historic office buildings are anything but open-floor plan-based. Open-floor plans suck for startups because the square footage is usually immense, which means you can't rent office space cheaply. That's why early stage startups these days end up working in accelerators where they can share space, if they're operating out of commercial space at all. Where startups operate with large open floor plans, it's because they've migrated to cheap areas with lots of supply and low demand, namely vacant industrial areas. But those are becoming scarce within cities.

The image of startups in open floor plans is really an artifact of necessity, with rationalizations after-the-fact for why they might be better. And in any event, anybody who has worked in the 1970s and 1980s era single-story office buildings in Silicon Valley knows that the layouts were typically neither totally open nor closed, but had spaces with varying qualities.

I have a small (2-3 person max) private office in an historic building in San Francisco's Financial District. Since the building was constructed in 1890, it's been principally occupied by professionals--doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, etc--who don't typically have many employees, if any. Over the past 5 years I've increasingly seen more tech startups here and it's really ideal for them because they can rent just enough space for what they need. And while the building management has leased a few floors in their entirety to some businesses (a securities trading firm, a game company, a law firm), they seem committed to keeping most of their space in a more traditional[1] layout.

And I'm really thankful for that commitment because I hate open-floor layouts. I like having my own, truly private space that isn't subleased from a larger office. These types of buildings are a rarity. I don't have to walk past any other desk (other than the security desk downstairs) coming to or leaving from my office. I don't have to worry about questions about why I come at noon one day and don't leave until noon the next day (all-night hacking session), nobody knows if I'm taking a nap, doing my taxes, etc. Not that I'd be offended by such questions, it's just that real privacy makes for a much less stressful and more productive environment for me, and I imagine many other people. At the same time, I really benefit from my work space and home space being separate.

[1] Very traditional, I should say, given that large open floor plans started in the 1950s. One of the earliest modernist skyscrapers in the now archetypal International Style--open floors, glass curtain walls, highly segregated service areas--the Crown Zellerbach Building, is one block from here, built in 1959. It's just a completely different architectural style internally. Night & day.

Why are you applying your very rare and individual use of space to an entirely broad city layout write-up?

Because implicit (or literally explicit, as in the article) in the notion of dense commercial space is the idea of diversity, where lots of different people can mingle and share ideas. When discussing street-level retail space the notion of having diversity in leasable floor area is well understood and accepted. If every retail space is 10,000 square feet you'll only get large chains. To get the small shops you need small spaces, down to just a couple hundred square feet and less.

But somehow we forget this lesson when it comes to leasable office space. If office space is only leased per floor, you're severely restricting the viability of smaller businesses and professionals in those spaces. Instead, you'll end up pushing all of them outside the core business district. Overtime you'll just end up with a smaller number of medium and large corporations from a small number of industries who are capable of leasing the large spaces.

If you want economic diversity downtown, you need diversity in leasable office space. Short-term that means less optimal use of office space. But long-term it means less volatility and more vibrancy.

Silicon Valley has a ton of single-story office complexes. What's really unique about those complexes, in addition to the sheer number, is that many of the leasable spaces are rather small. Not small enough for single early stage startups or professionals, but definitely small by comparison to what's typical of office architecture today. Given the premium price of office space in dense urban cores, if you want to reproduce in dense cities what Silicon Valley nurtured early, those cities will need smaller office spaces. Especially once the stock market crashes in the next year or so, and VC money becomes tighter.

That's actually a pretty good point. I know when I lived in Baltimore, this was a big problem. There's a ton of lage class B space but not much that's small.

Maybe you like privacy, but it might be better for your business to rent from a company like WeWork.

"I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on;"

http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

I'm amused this came up today, simply because I'm currently reading The Fountainhead.

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