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I shared this feeling when I was young, but a disillusionment with skyscrapers crept in as I increasingly recognized that although they are symbolically prominent and physically dense, they don't operate as communities that integrate in a broader sense. Office districts are ghost towns after commute hours; condo tower residents mostly stay behind their doors. The built infrastructure is reduced to the functional aspect of warehousing people like so many goods, and other types of spaces are found only by leaving the tower, turning walks into commutes. On many levels, they are industrial achievements, equivalents to the factory and railroad. And each of these structures has their beauty, but in all cases, they remind us of ourselves, and not of nature.

A world of steel-glass-concrete is incomplete in this sense, and I now see the appeal of low-rise neighborhoods that can distill a mixture of energies and create lively street scenes, quiet parks, and so forth.

Maybe that's because condos have windows that only face away from the building. Perhaps if they were built with interior common areas (like a town square) with windows facing them, that would change everything.

That’s an interesting point. In Europe at least a lot of buildings have big courtyards and windows face there. In Germany it’s less desirable to have a view of the street, unless you’re on a really high floor.

I currently am on the 40th with a view away from the building. I am trying to move to the 12th with a view across the facilities (pools mostly, it’s Asia). I’m curious whether that will change how I feel about the building.

Le Corbusier tried that but I think the prevailing agreement is that it didn't work.

Le Corbusier had a very specific view of towers though.

Tower social housing failed, mostly because it turns out concentrating poverty is a terrible idea, but that would be true if it were towers or two-story houses. And separating uses aggravated the problems by providing less diversity of people who could keep "eyes on the street" active. But none of that is really inherent to tower design.

We have a ton of those in Europe, and it’s a terrible idea generally - you have way too little privacy, lower floors have little sunlight, but above all - if anyone throws a party, or even has guests on a balcony, everyone else can hear it.

I don't think the privacy would be any more of an issue than it would be if the windows faced the street. That works because the apartment windows are not at eye level, they are a storey up. The ground floor would be shops, a bar, a coffee shop, arcade, etc.

Think town square.

Sunlight could be dealt with by not enclosing all sides of the common area, have the south side be windows to the outside.

>That works because the apartment windows are not at eye level, they are a storey up

But in an enclosed courtyard, there would be apartments across the way at eye level. Though that's solved by scale. With a large enough complex, the courtyard distance isn't much different than apartments across the street.

Are windows that face adjacent buildings (same side of the street) that big of a problem?

They're likely much closer together than any opposing courtyard windows would be.

It's a bit different since you have two separate, not necessarily functionally or aesthetically compatible, structures. But that almost certainly makes it worse than if you were able to design opposing views simultaneously.

I've never seen a side-window designed for a view, just smaller higher windows designed for light.

I wonder if we could deal with sunlight by using mirror panels on the internal walls. As long as the internal place is not formed of curved walls, it should be fine.

If it is formed of curved walls, it could be a nice place to put a solar-thermal plant.

I lived for a year in 12 story apartment block that was U shaped, I lived on the inner part of the U and this was exactly my experience. If anyone of the 72 inner apartments was having a party or just some late night drinks with friends you couldn’t sleep. Happened about 1-2 times a week.

I was surprised that building codes allowed such construction here in the UK as there’s lots of rules about sound insulation between units.

I've seen enough ghost town courtyards to know they don't change everything. If the building is completely devoid of any sense of community otherwise, the courtyard just feels like being in the spotlight of a bunch of strangers.

I do love courtyards though, and am always a little heartbroken when I visit someone at a place that has one and realize that no one really uses it.

I guess I don't really look to the building or the street for friends, but it is very nice when I meet people at work or other activities, and it turns out they live only a few buildings away from mine. That happens pretty often, because the chances of any given housing unit being within a few blocks of me is pretty high. Walking to and from dinners and parties is pretty nice. Sometimes I meet people who live in more internally close-knit low rise neighborhoods, and it's a big slog to go and see them.

> Office districts are ghost towns after commute hours; condo tower residents mostly stay behind their doors

Don’t blame skyscrapers for bad architecture and urban planning.

I live in a 76-story tower and people are pretty friendly and you say hello by the pool, etc. There’s more community here than in most of the blocks of 4-5-story houses I’ve lived on. You also have the staff around, so even when you are alone you can still say g’day to a few people, which is a big deal for instance in lockdowns.

And because the towers are surrounded by smaller buildings (not everyone can afford to live in the towers) there is plenty of vibrant life out on the street. Arguably more so than in the more spread-out areas, with the exception of Chinatown.

Sure, SF FiDi is an apocalypse after dark, but that’s not about skyscrapers, it’s about cynical and uncaring planners.

I live in a 76-story tower and people are pretty friendly and you say hello by the pool, etc

Admittedly I'm British so my view on things is a bit skewed but I'd definitely call that polite rather than friendly. Here in the UK we say a happy, cheery hello to people even if we actively hate them.

I love in a 44-story building (Warsaw) and people are definitely more friendly than just polite - I know more neighbours after 2 years of living here than in all my previous places of living combined (childhood excluded, I lived in 10-story building in a new neighborhood, and we had a ton of children in my age)

That's just the thing in Eastern Europe, definitely bigger sense of community than on the West. (Born and raised in the "southeast", lived in few eastern countries, as well in several western ones). I've never felt the sense of community in the northwestern europe like in the (south)east, and I'm fairly engaged in local ongoings.

> condo tower residents mostly stay behind their doors.

Where I grew up, where apartment buildings are very common middle class options, kids often socialised in the common areas - gardens, swimming pool, etc. Where I live now it’s a concern to buy where my daughter can have a nice community of kids to hang out with (we now live in a rented house that has a large common lawn connecting the backs of the block and kids play in this space all day long).

I think I would feel the same if I had grown up in America, because I do find suburban sprawl depressing and from what I've seen in most American cities I've visited, there's hardly any middle ground between that and the skyscrapers. So given that choice, I would greatly prefer the skyscrapers too.

But note that in other places there is plenty of middle ground. I live in a city where most buildings are in the range of 4 to 12 stories (someone actually computed the average height of a building and it's 5.15 stories) and it's enough for streets to be bustling with activity, and for being able to live without a car.

I do like the skyscraper aesthetic, but I also feel that once you go beyond a certain threshold, buildings start becoming soulless, and it also starts becoming harder to have regular, non-luxury shops at the street level due to that space being incredibly scarce, so the level of "boringness" goes up again (although not to the levels of suburbs, of course). So to me, mid-rise buildings (maybe with a few skyscrapers here are an there) are a good equilibrium. YMMV, of course.

I'm not advocating that anyone tear down the skyscrapers that currently exist. But I certainly do not agree with the idea that skyscrapers are the only or even the best solution to the problems we currently have rooted in trying to figure out how to make life work for roughly eight billion humans on planet earth.

If nothing else, skyscrapers are expensive; I don't think they would ever pencil out as the default mode of housing for most people. The 5-story model you talked about is pretty good - I went to college in a neighborhood like that - and that's what I'd like to see displace the suburbs for the greatest number of people in economically unspectacular places.

Still, I think it's important to have skyscraper cores and we should build them closer to the economic limits than the present legal limits.

Skyscrapers solve several really hard problems. For example, dense sidewalks have higher throughput than city streets or even subways, unfortunately people don’t walk very quickly and most sidewalks see little use. However, the number of places you can walk to directly correlates to building height. So, in effect someone walking surrounded by skyscrapers is doing the equivalent of highway speeds when surrounded by 6 story buildings.

Which is why NYC sidewalks get used so much, they are a very useful form of transportation. Which has positive knock on effects in terms of human health etc.

> However, the number of places you can walk to directly correlates to building height.

Except every floor doesn't have an equal effect? Lower levels and rooftops are going to host the majority of destinations, while mid-levels are most likely to be homes and offices that are adding to the pool of people able to walk to those destinations.

The ground floor of a 6 story building can’t support a full set of shops with just the people inside the building. This shows up as cities like Paris having clusters of destinations and then seemingly dead space streets filled with buildings only residents visit. It can still be “walkable”, but you’re walking farther with fewer destinations within walking distance.

It’s a basic economic reality is if a restaurant needs X customers to be viable a city will have some constant * population/X restaurants. Be they in 5 story buildings or 50.

It's important to note that this does not just apply to retail business, but to jobs and economic/social interactions of all kinds. Don't get me wrong, increased density is expensive all other things being equal, which is why the highest density can only be sustained in but a few very unusual places. But this is the stuff that actual agglomeration dynamics are driven by.

A restaurant's capacity isn't limited to the amount of customers that make it viable. There can be enough population to support two restaurants, but if the first restaurant has the capacity to serve them all and the customers prefer it, only one of them will actually survive.

So once you hit the point where the foot traffic retail is all viable, there's a stretch where there's not a real need for new businesses and any new competitors would face a large disadvantage from location.

Not that there aren't ways to design around that to make very high density areas viable, but it's not a simple line graph correlation.

Businesses can always acquire new customers by diversifying away from what the competition is providing. This means that larger markets can inherently "support" a higher variety - there simply isn't a point where new business must inherently fail. This is not a new observation; it has been made repeatedly since ancient times.

But it's going to take a whole hell of a lot of special sauce to survive when you're the first random mid-level restaurant competing against places that can attract customers through line of sight.

You can't simplify away the varying value of certain land for certain uses and still pretend you're doing economics.

Clearly I overly simplified things, but the point was doubling a cities population should roughly double the number of restaurants. That doesn’t hold for towns, but you see multiple McDonalds in the same city because being the closest McDonalds is a useful difference. Similarly at scale you see more specialization such as Thai vs Chinese vs Pho etc etc.

Add cost and you can have almost unlimited density without inherently limiting the number of restaurants much like how a mall can have 100 stores all selling different kinds of clothing.

I can see how walking between buildings and then riding elevators is a good local maximum, but I wonder if there’s another local maximum where you drive between buildings but climb stairs once you get to them.

There is no shortage of space for people. Only a shortage of places people actually want to live. Everyone flocks to mega-cities because that's where the jobs are.

Are you me? :) Glad to hear someone else with the exact same viewpoint.

Ever since I was a little kid I dreamed of living in a city with skyscrapers, and my partner's demand that we move out to the suburbs nearly ended our relationship.

What was the compromise? If there was one (!)

Well, at first I lost.

But it did help me discover that the most important thing for me was walkability. I could compromise on the highrise living, but we moved to a car-dependent neighborhood, and that's the part I despised most, and it significantly negatively affected my physical health, and thus then my mental health. I strongly believe that car-dependent suburbs are just plain awful.

In the end, money cured it for the most part. We rented a small studio pied-à-terre downtown and would spend a couple days there a week. We actually didn't do this for too long because it wasn't long until Covid hit and downtown basically died, so we didn't renew our lease. Not sure what's next.

Is it need or want to live among skyscrapers?

I prefer mountains myself

Sounds like a Russel's conjugation [0]. When you're banning the buildings I like it is because of "human needs," when I say I like them it is just a "want."

I do think mountains give a similar effect, having interesting variations in height and a sense of being "walled in." I reliably feel like crap at elevation though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation

I had exactly opposite feeling when, at 30, I visited Manhattan. The downtown (from the street level) was just depressing, all these skyscraper walls around you. Then subway (which looks like a cellar, I couldn't find the station entrance despite looking at it) to 103rd street where I had hostel, not much better feeling with dense high-rise appartments. I had to take a quick walk into central park to recuperate, although it was not recommended to stay after dark there.

I wouldn't want to live there. And mind you, I was born in the center of Prague's Jizni mesto, which is a district designed in the 70s by communist government (to solve a housing crisis), build with cookie-cutter, 8-12 store, grey and boxy appartment buildings. Certainly not ideal urbanistically, very little commercial zoning, but still quite a bit of greenery (and from the 6th floor, we can actually view about 30 km to the countryside). In fact, some claim there was more space dedicated to greenery when it was built than in modern capitalist "luxury residential" developments.

The problem in US is not with skyscrapers but with the grid structure.

Singapore is an awesome example of a coty filled with skyscrapers but no grid, amd it feels amazing and spacious.

> I have a human need to live among skyscrapers

Do you really? There are lots of cities outside the US with 6-story or 12-story buildings that are very vibrant. We don't really need skyscrapers for that.

It's clearly a personal preference. Many people adore old historical districts of Europe, dream of living in Paris or Florence. Some can't stand the buzz of the city and prefer to have a place in the countryside. Some just like modern tall metal and glass buildings.

> Do you really?

Yes. Your desires and preferences aren’t objectively correct, in case you’re shocked here.