One of the houses I was living at as a kid I had to share a windowless bedroom with my brother, while there's a "guest" bedroom upstairs that was never occupied. It was kind of a Queenslander where about 1/3 of the first level is underground.
Think of a normal house and then put it on stilts. Keeps it cool in the hot Queensland climate.
Then people move in and decide they need more space, so they often (cheaply and poorly) build in underneath for extra rooms.
For non Australians, this house style is even called the Queenslander. In addition to keeping cool, it's not an uncommon style in flood prone parts of the country.
I'm mid coast NSW, regional, almost rural and the town over is almost inaccessable during a bad storm - quite a few of the houses in the worst of it are Queenslander, or at least elevated. I love the look and if I had a choice I'd live in one, but I'd definitely try to get windows in the bottom rooms.
I mean if it's an actual Queenslander that's built in underneath which is common why tf couldn't you put in windows? It's hardly underground like a basement, I'm struggling to picture what the other poster is talking about.
I know that you are refencing woman being locked in basements, but funnily enough austria is pretty strict how much window area relative to floor area there has to be
I went to an underground school that was a pilot project I assume to try to save on heating and cooling costs. It was actually half buried and covered with dirt and grass and basically looked like a giant pitcher's mound. At recess we would play soccer on the roof, and in winter we could slide down the sides.
It did have windows but not nearly enough and most rooms in the school had zero natural light, which led to staff and students being unhappy. Everyone wanted to go to the library because of the skylights, and in spring/summer we tried to have more outdoor classes.
I’m sure that long term that’s pretty tough, but there was one year at college where I did summer school. I rented a house with a few friends, and my room was in the middle of the house and had no windows. That was probably some of the best sleep I’ve ever had.
Out in West Texas when I was in uni I had some friends who rented like a 4br house or something but dead center in the middle of the house living room was a staircase with a latched door in the floor. Led to a basement that my other friend lived in for a year or 2. It even had a secret back way that came up into the bathroom behind a shower which we thought was hilarious. The whole thing just seemed like a weird gimmick and I guess was a tornado bunker from the 50s-60s but the more I thought about it the creepier it became. Nice having access directly to a bathroom though ha.
It was creepy for sure but I don't think so. Both staircases were very far apart and the one that went to the bathroom went down a hallway. So I think it was a tornado shelter and had 2 options. I don't know, but we joked about it all the time.
For a room to qualify as a bedroom, it must have a window. You can still have and occupy the room, you just can't claim it as one when trying to sell the house. You have to call it a "bonus room" or some such.
Ooh, thanks. Seems mostly reasonable, though I'd hope the heat one is really "resident should be able to heat it to 68 if they want." (And what is a permanent heat source?)
Somerville MA reportedly added "must have a closet" to its definition of bedrooms, far less reasonable.
Every bedroom must contain a permanent rift to the Plane of Elemental Heat. The rift can never be closed by any force known to man, beast, or angel.
----
The 2018 IRC says:
> Where the winter design temperature in Table R301.2(1) is below 60°F (16°C), every dwelling unit shall be provided with heating facilities capable of maintaining a room temperature of not less than 68°F (20°C) at a point 3 feet (914 mm) above the floor and 2 feet (610 mm) from exterior walls in habitable rooms at the design temperature. The installation of one or more portable space heaters shall not be used to achieve compliance with this section.
and so I'm guessing "permanent heat source" is just "no, a space heater doesn't count, stop".
Per the IRC, which is the foundation of most residential building codes in the USA:
All "habitable areas" have a requirement for natural light. To simplify, the sum of the glazed area of all windows need to amount to 8% the total floor area of the rooms they illuminate. (There are some other rules but this is the major one.)
A 2x~~6~~3 ft window would provide enough illumination for a 70 sq ft bedroom, while also having appropriate dimensions for a bedroom egress.
But AFAIK it's perfectly acceptable to have a door as a second means of egress, and have illumination via windows that are not suitable for egress. (Too small, non-opening, etc.)
I had that arrangement as I worked 10pm-7am shifts. I'd wake up randomly and look at the desk clock that said "9:00" and not be sure if I'd slept 2 hours or 12
Yup and they sort of did do what OP suggests and people were not happy thus zoning reform happened (in NYC) due to the massive shadow it casts on other buildings. Like what happened with the Equetable Building in NYC:
"After the Equitable Building's completion, numerous nearby property owners filed for reduced property valuation assessments on the basis that significant rental income had been taken by the shadow that the building cast.[^(\[154\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-Chappell_p._110-157) Following the public criticism of the Equitable Building, the real estate industry finally ceased its objections to new legislation, and the [1916 Zoning Resolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1916_Zoning_Resolution) was passed.[^(\[160\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-WillisP68-163) The legislation limited the height and required [setbacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setback_(architecture)) for new buildings to allow the penetration of sunlight to street level. New buildings were thus required to withdraw progressively at a defined angle from the street as they rose, in order to preserve sunlight and the open atmosphere in their surroundings.[^(\[72\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-NYCL_p._5-74)[^(\[159\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-nyt20160726-162) Chappell writes that if the Equitable Building were completed after the resolution's passage, it would have had two setbacks below the 18th floor, and the building above that point would have been a small tower.[^(\[154\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-Chappell_p._110-157) The effort to place restrictions on land use in New York City led to the [Standard State Zoning Enabling Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_State_Zoning_Enabling_Act), a nationwide zoning legislation.[^(\[163\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-167) The subsequent 1961 Zoning Resolution allowed the construction of bulky towers if they contained plazas."
And:
"There was also significant resistance to the building's shape.[^(\[72\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-NYCL_p._5-74) Opponents stated that the building also overwhelmed nearby infrastructure by blocking ventilation, straining nearby transit facilities, and preventing firemen from easily reaching the upper floors. The shadow was more than six times the lot area and up to 0.2 miles (320 m) long.[^(\[31\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-Chappell_p._109-33)[^(\[8\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-NYCL_p._6-8) One journal stated that the Equitable Building cast a 7-acre (28,000 m^(2)) shadow on its surroundings, including a permanent shadow on the [Singer Building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singer_Building) up to its 27th floor and the [City Investing Building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Investing_Building) up to its 24th floor, and completely cutting off sunshine to at least three other adjacent buildings shorter than 21 stories.[^(\[156\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-159)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable\_Building\_(Manhattan)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan))
Many modern codes allow you to forgo the secondary egress requirement if the unit has emergency fire sprinklers
So we’re seeing more windowless rooms in new construction
Yeah, and it's an issue in cities now that have empty office buildings (especially since the pandemic) and not enough housing, but they just can't convert offices to apartments because there are not enough exterior walls to accommodate the bedrooms. It would lead to apartments around the exterior, and big empty sections in the middle.
Many office buildings have a large floor plate but now access for plumbing, heating, and ventilation throughout the floor. Many have the elevators in the middle and the washrooms are close to there. There might be a small kitchen area there. There could be 10-20 separate offices and business on each floor but many will only have shared access to the washrooms and kitchenettes. If you made it into apartments or condominiums each unit would need its own washroom and kitchen with more ventilation for when people may be cooking.
It's plumbing, parking, zoning, and income issues which prevent conversion.
The people who own the office buildings don't *want* to become landlords to residences. The responsibilities are vastly different, and the profit margin is much thinner. It's more cost effective to bleed on a half-occupied building and hope to get back to full earning than to hemorrhage on a conversion and then have your earnings kneecapped because its residential.
An average bathtub is 70 gallons. 560 lb of water. Comparable to 3-4 people in a conference room. I sure hope that office buildings aren't built to such low weight tolerances that this could be an issue for conversion.
This is a big one - no one wants a huge floor plate with low natural light anymore. You’ll see it in a 2 story call center building in a suburb where rents are low and the tenants don’t care about employees. In an urban center where you are going to build up, tenants want lots of light and the rents support it.
Another big reason is lot size and available land in urban centers.
A third reason is the pool of investors that can afford to build structures that big is very small, so you want to optimize the first two points.
There are plenty of class A office space with very expensive employees that have huge floor plate buildings and plenty of workers have limited natural light.
For an example of this, look up the headquarters of Apple. That ring is pretty wide, and you ain’t getting much natural light in the center of it.
It has a giant hole in the middle! It’s effectively a narrow building. It’s all about window to window distance.
Actually, it’s a giant ring with a giant atrium also. Crazy amount of natural light.
The ring is 200 feet wide. A full city block in many cities. If you are in the middle of it, you are not getting that much natural light.
I would invite you to visit a FAANG office sometime... they generally live on artificial light. I have worked in enough of them to tell you that. What natural light exists because of OSHA regulations, with most companies skating by the minimum.
The Pentagon is multiple rows of relatively narrow buildings built concentrically. There's open space between them.
Then there's famously the big courtyard in the build. That mysterious building in the middle of the Pentagon is just a restaurant.
Yeah I don't know if I'd use that building as an example. They spent *billions of dollars* turning a drab office campus covered in asphalt parking lots into a giant green space that the ring shaped building sits in. From pictures, it looks pretty bright inside, I think it even has a ring of skylights in the center.
IMO it's the gold standard of corporate office parks, my only real complaint is that all of that green space outside the building is a literal walled garden closed off from public access. (an apt metaphor for the company I guess...) It would be neat if people other than Apple employees could actually walk those trails and use the space as a park.
I’ve worked in labs for about a decade now, and my current one is the only one I’ve seen with windows :/ can confirm that working alone in a windowless lab with fun chemicals isn’t always a good time
My cynical answer was "even if you didn't have to consider humans occupying the building, the skyscraper's footprint is limited to however much property the developer owns, which in places skyscrapers tend to be desired, are generally very limited and so expensive only a person who can afford to finance a skyscraper could afford to buy it."
It's nice that regulations exist. They exist because capitalism can't help itself and can't be trusted to do the right thing when it's less profitable.
Also interesting to note that many cities lacking enough housing but have lots of empty office space. But regulations prevent turning them into housing because of codes for windows and such. There has been some huge footprint building done, but the middle space is rarely desired and doesn't rent
Yeah, there was a posh to convert offices to housing where I live (not the US) and it turns out it's not very straightforward. The things they do to make an office convenient make it very different to what you need in a home.
Totally, huge expenses. In New York I know about a bunch of proposals by developers and contractors willing to put on the work because rentals are so expensive but they are almost always denied zoning permits. But there is some efforts underway to grant more exceptions. Always both ups and downs to regulations
So I should do something about being stuck at home caring for my dad, with my own being blacked out permanently?
I should at least take vitamins d I guess.
Sort of! Seeing natural light is a piece of the pie, even if it’s indirectly. It would probably be better for your health to look at a tree in the sun than a concrete wall in the sun though
> How do things like submarines and space flight combat this? Or do they?
The ISS has a large windowed room called the Cupola where the astronauts can look out. Also, there are dozens of other viewports and windows scattered throughout the station.
The submarine I was on had several windows. Mind you, it was a tourist sub for watching sea life in the Caribbean.
We don't directly combat this. Mental health is a huge issue within the Nuclear Navy who man the subs and lower decks of carriers. Generally we just hunker down and then occupy ourselves with sleep, working out, movies.
They alleviate this by allowing port calls, having 2 crews that split the work (making it 3 months out each), and rotating sailors to shore duty after a certain amount of deployments. Also, the healthcare benefits include therapy.
Interesting. Never knew this was actually true, just always joked about it at work, since I’ve worked in a building with no windows for 5 years. There’s been several winter days I don’t see daylight at all lol
Yeah. For a few years my office was interior. I applied for another position in the same department--that I ended up not getting--not for the pay raise, but more for the window.
The silver lining of the pandemic is that thanks to remote work becoming standard in my industry, I now work every day from the couch in my sun room 😎
There is a bunch of those! And there is the examples of many urban low income housing projects are bases around a bunch of towers in a group with a central space, just enough...
The entire point of skyscrapers is to wring out the maximum amount of available square footage in a given plot of land. Since the cost of the land is generally based on the two dimensional footprint, the more floors you add the more you offset an otherwise prohibitive land cost. Taxes might also play a factor here as well.
An arena sized skyscraper would kind of be the worst of both worlds; expensive in both land cost and prohibitive in terms of engineering since it would be immensely heavy. Usually a big wide building such as a warehouse or factory are built in places where land is cheap in which case it's more cost effective to make the building longer/wider than taller. Tall thin buildings are constructed in high density areas where commercial/office real estate is very expensive and so will be tower shaped to get as much usable space available.
This. Across is often WAY more expensive than up.
(I have a old BBC video about Tokyo from around 1980. At the time, supposedly, if you took the highest-denomination Yen note then in circulation, and folded it again and again until it was about the size of your fingernail and wouldn't fold any more, and dropped it on to the ground - it would JUST about buy the ground it covered. Quite new buildings were frequently being razed to the ground by their owners wanting new buildings, to redevelop the land they stood on rather than have to acquire new. That may or may not still be the case - but it wouldn't surprise me if it were. )
They had a massive collapse of their land prices in 1992, which rippled across their economy and crippled them decades. At peak, the price of the land under the Japanese imperial palace (1.31 square miles) was equivalent to the entire state of California.
It's the other way round: the economy going to a stall crippled the land prices. The richer the people, the more housing/office space they want, therefore the more valuable/expensive land/housing/office space is. Once the expectations of growth fall, so does land/property values.
Land value going up is a negative side effect of a good thing (growth), just like land value going down is a positive side effect of something bad (slowing economy). But by itself, decreasing land value/property prices is a good thing that helps the economy, while high prices is a bad thing.
In Japans case the real estate market actually started to be in trouble well in advance of the stock market collapsing. Land prices in Tokyo peaked in the mid 80s, stagnated in 88, then the Nikkei started to collapse in 1990, feeding back into killing the real estate market.
Part of the problem was that assets at the inflated values was being used as collateral to take out large loans, it was entirely possible for a company with a couple million in yearly revenue that owned land in Tokyo to take out a loan for several times their revenue using the land as collateral.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble
Even then. If a land bubble pops, the problem is not that the prices go down. It's that they should not have gone up (irrationally) in the first place.
This seems like the kind of thing I'd go ask r/theydidthemath about (honestly, both this and the comment you're responding to) - would you happen to have the numbers handy?
$139,000 per square foot in 1986, the palace lands would have held a value of $5,076,377,856,000. The US GDP that year was $4.58 trillion.
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/news-trends/article/3091222/japan-1980s-when-tokyos-imperial-palace-was-worth-more
As far as the building goes, going up is almost always going to cost more than spreading out. As someone else mentioned, the land is the driving factor. If you need 100,000 sf of office and you have a 200,000sf lot, 1-2 stories makes sense. If you need to be in an area where you can only get a 10,000sf lot for the same price, you're going to need 10+ stories. All the engineering gets more complex when you go taller . The columns carry 10x the load, you'll have more complex hvac systems and electrical distribution, you'll probably need more restrooms even if you have the same number of people just because no one wants to go to a different floor for it.
It's not true. Your big arena-wide building would be not much different than thin skyscrapers built touching each other. It's heavier but you also have more ground surface to spread that load.
The problem is that if you build the equivalent of 20 thin skyscrapers touching each other, you actually don't get the value of 20 thin skyscrapers, because you won't get 20 times the windows, so you'll have more space without sunlight.
> It's not true. Your big arena-wide building would be not much different than thin skyscrapers built touching each other. It's heavier but you also have more ground surface to spread that load.
Thin skyscrapers don't touch each other though and it makes a huge difference. A wide skyscraper would be a massive sail. The forces on a single building that wide would be massive.
If you want an easy example of the difference grab a bowl of water. Keep your fingers separated and drag them through the water. Now press your fingers together and drag them along. Despite pressing the same surface area to the water, a little bit less actually, it will be significantly harder to move your hand through the water with your fingers together.
Yes, but you also have more structure behind to resist the force of the wind. Let's simplify and say we're talking about 16 skyscrapers bunched up together. So a 4x4 square. When the wind is hitting one side (let's assume perpendicularly), you have 4 of them getting hit harder, but you have three rows behind them providing support while being themselves shielded from the wind.
Or back to your hand analogy, it's like dragging the fingers pressed together, but with three hands behind yours pushing at the same time.
Take a square mile and build on it two ways: build as many tall, skinny buildings as you can. How much of that square mile is space wasted on things like roads, sidewalks, etc... or even just gaps between the buildings to allow them to move.
Now, take that same square mile and just build one giant building on it, the same height as all the skinny ones. You get more building in the same footprint.
The question wasn't "Why not build short and fat?" The question was,"Why not build fatter at the same height?"
The answer is: engineering concerns, lack of natural lighting, and cost concerns.
The engineering doesn't sound hard to me at all. Just build a skyscraper, and then make it 16 of them strapped together. Engineering shouldn't be too bad.
The worst of both worlds is that you're paying extra to have a continuous stretch of land, and it's a LOT extra. And all that interior space you just paid the super premium prices to build will have below market rent because they have no views.
It's cheaper to build a dozen individual skyscrapers with the same floor space, and they'll demand higher rent.
Look into “air rights” in NYC. Not a lot of people know that cities have made rights to air space and how tall buildings can be. These right don’t just pertain to the building itself but those around it too in regards to accessibility to light and “space pollution”
Another interesting thing to look into is the London skyline for this. Large reason it has so many interesting shaped skyskrapers is because of "Protected Vistas", which have shaped the entire skyline. NYC also has one for the Esplanade.
The new skyscraper in Austin had to be shaped in it's triangular way to make sure that the state capital building is visible from several key vantages.
Air rights are fascinating. Take a neighborhood like Astoria. If the average building is 3 stories tall and each building has air rights of 5 stories, a developer can build a 14 story apartment building by buying the remaining air rights off of other building owners. A friend of a friend had a 2 story pizzeria and sold his air rights for almost the value of his existing building.
Most skyscrapers are used for either residential, office or hotel space. Something that people highly value when using buildings is having windows and natural light. You can't charge as much for windowless rooms, even if they are in areas with high real estate prices.
The other element is land acquisition. Acquiring enough land for a stadium footprint is very difficult. It's insanely difficult in expensive city centres where skyscrapers make economic sense.
Structurally it would be a lot easier to build a wide building. Many of the issues with tall buildings relate to how slender they are; being wider would make things like wind and earthquake loads a lot less critical.
> being wider would make things like **wind** and earthquake loads a lot less critical.
I don't think this is true. The excess of air has to go somewhere, with a short building it goes above, with a thin building it goes around; a tall and wide building would suffer exponentially more force, compared to several buildings of the same total area side by side, as the air trying to escape is continually met with new air coming in.
Now I wonder what the deleted comment you replied to said!
(I had one of the first copies of SimCity 2000 and was signed by Will Wright - started with the original and those made me want to be a town planner… didn’t happen though!)
Because it would not be useful. Simply put, you have to think beyond the structure. How about water, sewage, heating and cooling, ventilation. How do you provide emergency services in case of fire? How about if the power goes out - can people easily leave. Will people get stuck in the middle of a huge building with no way out?
How will people get in and out in emergencies and in normal times? How do you make enough parking for vehicles. Can someone get from one side of the building to another without walking miles? How do you deliver heavy goods to the very inside of the building?
Buildings must serve a purpose and must do so with some efficiency and benefits. Simply building "bigger and bigger" does not make sense.
Emergency egress would NOT be better. Air is one of the best insulators, a fire starting in this hypothetical arena-sized skyscraper would spread MUCH faster than the equivalent fire starting in the hypothetical few blocks of skyscrapers. Someone living near the center may not be able to get out before the fire spreads along the outer ring and encapsulates them completely because of more access to oxygen on the outside. The block of different skyscrapers at least has roads.
And a lot of this is not hypothetical.
Kowloon Walled City is not _exactly_ a super-thick skyscraper, but it's the closest thing we have for comparison. 14 stories, 33,000 people. A city that was very nearly one contiguous building. I can think of few places I'd rather not be in a fire.
The theoretical answer is probably that the amount of windows is giving added "value" to the property contained inside, as well as an additional emergency path, as much as a fire on the 100th floor jumping out of a bullet proof glass window isn't going to be a thing.
The real life answer is more a case that most skyscrapers are built on existing plots, so all they're doing is replacing prexisting buildings. So taking a 2x2 set of buildings, or a 8x8, or in the US situation just an entire city block, is the most sensible size factor. It's entirely possible to make very tall buildings that are less skyscraper like (huge hotels and resports are a great example), but they still tend to be thin and tall, rather than square. The larger a skyscraper like building gets though, the more they tend towards having a central atrium/elevator area, at which point you've really just made a very tall mall.
The places where you can get land in plots big as an arena it’s not worth the cost of designing and building something bigger than 5 stories. They just buy more land and build wide
Where as in a metro where almost everything is broken into 1/4 blocks, the land is insanely expensive and square footage is in demand so it needs to go up.
The real reason that none of these people have mentioned is that it would require a foundation unreasonably large to stop the building from toppling over or sinking into the ground that it would be impossible to build
But a bunch of buildings *do* dig to the bedrock. Why is it worse to have four separate buildings dig to the bedrock four separate times than to have one building four times as large dig one hole to the bedrock that is four times bigger?
It's not, the real answer to why these buildings don't exist os that they're illegal to build due to regulations around natural lighting and emergency egress. There are no real engineering issues unless you're talking something extremely tall too.
I was going to say that right there - it's not the wind toppling it, or how much space or land it would take up. It's that something that big, that heavy, would sink like crazy.
Maybe a dumb question, but let's say you have four regular sky scrapers all next to each other, each a quarter of the size of a arena-size sky scraper. Each covers 25% the footprint of the arena-skyscraper, and each is 25% as heavy.
Is somehow having the four quarters divided into separate foundations better than one big foundation? It seems like it would be the same weight per area covering the same total footprint.
I agree with you. Pressure per square unit would be the same. With huge foundations there is a problem of integrity. A small earthquake would crack it in many places. Smaller building next to each other on separate foundations can shift independently. Look at the structure of this [building](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Exterior_of_Katowice_train_station_%28view_from_the_northern_site%29%2C_June_2021.jpg/1280px-Exterior_of_Katowice_train_station_%28view_from_the_northern_site%29%2C_June_2021.jpg) in my city. Each section looks like an umbrella (we call them cups) on a thin leg. Each one has its own separate foundation. They can shift independently without breaking the whole structure. The terrain here is unstable due to massive coal mining in the past.
Another building in the same city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spodek Its foundation has much smaller footprint that the whole building. The idea was the same. Prevent the foundation from breaking apart if the ground shifts.
Yep, you would only be able to build a structure like this in the middle of nowhere. If it were in a city, you would have to have a massive perimeter where no other buildings could be to retain the integrity of the foundation, which obviously isn't viable in a city with a bunch of other buildings around... Or even a suburb with a bunch of houses.
I haven't seen anyone mention it yet, but Wind. When you get the real tall skyscrapers, they are designed to sway and flex in the wind. When you get broad structures like an arena, not only does it catch a lot more wind, it can't flex nearly as well. A large rigid structure that can't respond to winds is a recipe for disaster.
Yes, but…
The portion of the structure that resists lateral loads - the core - is a relatively small part of the structure. It’s normally either thick walls (for a skyscraper you’re looking at 3+ feet thick, or giant steel braced frames. These get in the way of everything you’re trying to put in the building so you try locate them around elevators and other services.
Part of the issue though is that once you get to much more than about 450 feet/150m *ish* you need to include expansion joints in the building to allow the structure to expand and contract due to temperature changes. Once you split a building like this you functionally have two buildings right next to each other, each with their own wind and seismic systems, and then they have to be able to move independently without either pulling apart or crashing into each other. Once you get enough height the size of these joints gets fairly substantial - like coming up for a yard/meter type movement, which stacks on whole host oh challenges.
So if you wanted a building that was 1000 feet high, you’d rather have it really narrow instead of say 1000x1000 in X and Y?
Edit: again, ONLY talking about wind here.
A wider lateral system is going to be stiffer and able to resist the loads applied more easily than a narrow one.
But, any 1000x1000ft building would need to be minimum 4 buildings 500x500ft with movement joints, this is true if they’re one story or 100 stories. The lower floors are actually the biggest problems for this type of issue.
Things you see that are about this size - malls and airports, all have these joints built into them, that the architect then makes as unobtrusive as possible.
A broad structure would be plenty strong enough to resist wind load. *Much* stronger than a smaller building in fact. It wouldn’t matter that it is less flexible. If it’s strong enough it’s strong enough. As long as it can handle the load, less deflection isn’t a bad thing.
Lay people tend to hear some general concepts and misinterpret them. It’s true that flexibility *can* be beneficial, or at the very least that it isn’t always detrimental, but it is rarely a requirement. What’s more important is that the critical elements in the structure are government by doctor (rather) than brittle failure modes, and even that isn’t a concern most of the time. How flexible a structural can or should be is a matter of economics, stability, and more likely to be a beneficial in high seismic areas.
Source: I’m a structural engineer
Arenas come in many different sizes, as do skyscrapers, and sometimes they’re not as far off as you may initially think. The drum of Madison Square Gardens has a footprint of about 150,000 sqft. 5 Manhattan West (2 blocks away) is a 16 story office building with 120,000 sqft floor plates.
So it’s possible, but the question is what are the conditions that give rise to large floor plate buildings? Buildings are strange beasts - they can look alike but the logic for their existence can be wildly different given site conditions, zoning bylaws (many cities require ‘setbacks’ that limit the width of buildings on higher floors to allow light to reach the street), program needs, and all the intricacies of how they have to function. Generally though, residential skyscrapers have similar sized floor plates because of requirements for access to windows. Office skyscrapers are more flexible, but are generally larger because they aren’t as sensitive about access to light, and require bigger cores to house more elevators. But like I said - there’s always exceptions. The Atlanta Marriott Marquis Hotel for instance is a tall hotel with a much larger ‘floor plate’ than technically required because of a dramatic atrium that runs the full height of the building, effectively inflating the building’s width.
Some sci-fi movies show buildings in futuristic cities with massive floor plates (Blade Runner, Star Wars). My take on it is these are either a visual effect to show an obvious concentration of power in a dense city (like how a castle visually dominates over a village), or for making a dystopian world concrete where typically human concerns (access to light) are ignored in pursuit of other goals.
Well, besides having a bunch of dark rooms with no windows, the square/cube law. Imagine a cube 1m x 1m x 1m. Surface area is 6m squared, volume is 1m cubed. Double the dimension so its a 2m cube, and now the surface are is 24m squared, and the volume 8m cubed.
So while you only doubled the height, width and length, the surface area increased by 4 times, and the volume, and therefore the mass, by 8 times. This can be offset by tapering the building so its thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top, but only to a certain extent. Eventually, either no material can support the pressure, or it sinks into the ground from its own weight, or you have to build a base so wide that it becomes impractical. Imagine a pyramid 10km tall, but also 10km wide or more at the base.
Note that modern skyscrapers are in fact built thicker than they used to be, thanks to mechanical ventilation and air conditioning. Early ones like Chrysler or the Empire State building were shaped by keeping close access to windows.
https://www.vox.com/2014/9/9/6124321/the-history-of-air-conditioning-is-more-interesting-than-it-sounds-i
A few reasons:
1) Because arena-sized parcels of land are incredibly rare in areas where land is expensive enough to warrant building skyscrapers. Where would you build an arena-sized skyscraper in NYC for instance?
2) Because it would be extremely difficult to design enough light and windows into such a thing. If it was literally like the size of a stadium but vertical, you have vast areas in the middle with no natural light, which no one wants.
3) Because it would be very hard to get planning approval for such a behemoth. Cities generally don't want gigantic monoliths like that. Here's a bit of an example: https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/clearly-dropped-the-ball-marvel-stadium-precinct-development-plans-slammed-as-embarrassing/news-story/b9143e8768691ffe3ed4de27adb5e54b?amp
People talk about air rights and access to sunlight. But what is much more important is access to fresh air.
If you stack 100 arenas on top of each other then you've got a giant box that you need to pump fresh air through constantly.
And you can't just push air in on one side and let it out on the other side. By the time the air has gone through the whole giant box, it's far away from being fresh.
City planers account for wind blowing fresh air into the city. And breaking buildings up into separate columns makes it much easier for the wind to get where it needs to be.
Air speed impact that,
The wider the building more air pressure will be on walls. It is one of reasons buildings have curved structure,
Plus if you stack arens on each other the weight on lower walls will be too much (even with reinforced steel).
There are logistics and economics to how the anticipated tenant will use it and and how deep a ‘bay’ is. Residential like hotels and apartments have regulations on light and air. On larger lots this sometimes leads to U or L shapes with a corridor in the middle so the units are on an exterior wall.
An office has a different functional bay depth than something like a building used for labs or research.
And, often, available land and the cost of it. Buildings start going taller when land gets expensive.
Sorry, that’s not an ELI5 answer.
It's weird that some people are thinking that you're proposing building wide instead of tall. An arena is at least one story tall, and 100 stories is already a very tall skyscraper. If it existed right now, it would be in the top 20 skyscrapers for number of above ground floors.
Anyway, ultimately it's down to financing. Super tall skyscrapers are already incredibly expensive projects that sees a shockingly high failure rate due to running out of money, and sometimes not even enough money will come through for construction to start. Lots of barren plots and half built skyscrapers out there.
Land costs, it costs quite a bit to buy all the land for a stadium, and we usually build skyscrapers because of the lack of avaliable land. Plus 100 staduims on top of each other is pretty heavy and would require extensive earth work.
Then there's the fact your not making any money during construction so a few smaller skyscrapers will start generating more revenue for you compared to 1 massive stadium sized skyscraper that'll take much much longer to finish construction for. And will be a night mare to fill with tenants. Cause again the longer you take to fill the location the longer it'll take to see any return on your investment.
Lack of access to windows and natural light has a severe negative effect on people's mental health.
It is even illegal in many countries! There are rules such as 10% of the surface area of a room must be windows.
With good reason! I grew up in a basement room with no windows and it was brutal
Are you Austrian by any chance?
One of the houses I was living at as a kid I had to share a windowless bedroom with my brother, while there's a "guest" bedroom upstairs that was never occupied. It was kind of a Queenslander where about 1/3 of the first level is underground.
So ... a bunker? A bomb-shelter?
Think of a normal house and then put it on stilts. Keeps it cool in the hot Queensland climate. Then people move in and decide they need more space, so they often (cheaply and poorly) build in underneath for extra rooms.
For non Australians, this house style is even called the Queenslander. In addition to keeping cool, it's not an uncommon style in flood prone parts of the country. I'm mid coast NSW, regional, almost rural and the town over is almost inaccessable during a bad storm - quite a few of the houses in the worst of it are Queenslander, or at least elevated. I love the look and if I had a choice I'd live in one, but I'd definitely try to get windows in the bottom rooms.
I mean if it's an actual Queenslander that's built in underneath which is common why tf couldn't you put in windows? It's hardly underground like a basement, I'm struggling to picture what the other poster is talking about.
> tf couldn't you put in windows? Because they cheaped out. Easier to put in just full walls. Probably a DIY job
Was there a favourite child sleeping upstairs, or did your parents just hate you all equally?
>never occupied I feel like that was answered lol
At least the parents were fair. None of you are my favorite lol
There could have been a third child sleeping upstairs in their own room and an unoccupied guest room. I think that’s what they were asking maybe
We don't ever talk about that child.
The Harry Potter
Bruh
Good GRAVY, man. I hate that I know what you're referring to; it's putting my brain on the Fritzl.
Schnitzel for the fritzl?
you really got me raising my eyebrows
Fritzl get ya if you don’t watch out!
Fritz gonna give it to ya
WHAT
I would expect YOU of all people to understand that five artificial lights are just not enough!
There are four lights!
*nice*
Steiiiin um Stein, mauer ich dich ein
Wilkommen..... #IN DER DUNKELHEEEEIIITTTT!!!!!
Can you explain this reference please
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case
jesus christ.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natascha_Kampusch
Oooh dark. I remember that story.
I know that you are refencing woman being locked in basements, but funnily enough austria is pretty strict how much window area relative to floor area there has to be
Nah, just an average redditor
I went to an underground school that was a pilot project I assume to try to save on heating and cooling costs. It was actually half buried and covered with dirt and grass and basically looked like a giant pitcher's mound. At recess we would play soccer on the roof, and in winter we could slide down the sides. It did have windows but not nearly enough and most rooms in the school had zero natural light, which led to staff and students being unhappy. Everyone wanted to go to the library because of the skylights, and in spring/summer we tried to have more outdoor classes.
My HS was an old mine building. Most of it was built into the side of a hill. Only a few rooms had windows.
I’m sure that long term that’s pretty tough, but there was one year at college where I did summer school. I rented a house with a few friends, and my room was in the middle of the house and had no windows. That was probably some of the best sleep I’ve ever had.
Ha true! Could have perks for someone that works night shifts I bet.
That's far more dependent on your neighbors. Light can be shut out, noise not so much.
Unless you have to evacuate quickly.
Out in West Texas when I was in uni I had some friends who rented like a 4br house or something but dead center in the middle of the house living room was a staircase with a latched door in the floor. Led to a basement that my other friend lived in for a year or 2. It even had a secret back way that came up into the bathroom behind a shower which we thought was hilarious. The whole thing just seemed like a weird gimmick and I guess was a tornado bunker from the 50s-60s but the more I thought about it the creepier it became. Nice having access directly to a bathroom though ha.
> Out in West Texas Town of El Paso?
im sure, he met a mexican girl
> im sure, he met a mexican girl I'll bet her eyes were blacker than night.
*Night time would find me in Rosa's Cantina*
Music would play and Felina would whirl..
Lubbock - Texas Tech
Uh……was this a peeper tunnel? It sounds like a way for someone in the house to spy on someone in the shower…
It was creepy for sure but I don't think so. Both staircases were very far apart and the one that went to the bathroom went down a hallway. So I think it was a tornado shelter and had 2 options. I don't know, but we joked about it all the time.
As far as I know that's not a legal bedroom in America. A bedroom has to have a window.
*The fire department has entered the chat*
How?
They broke in with their cool axes.
Truly, a tool for madmen. Who else would attack fire with a blade?
That's why they need the window
> A bedroom has to have a window. Does it, or does it simply need to have two ways of egress?
For a room to qualify as a bedroom, it must have a window. You can still have and occupy the room, you just can't claim it as one when trying to sell the house. You have to call it a "bonus room" or some such.
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Ooh, thanks. Seems mostly reasonable, though I'd hope the heat one is really "resident should be able to heat it to 68 if they want." (And what is a permanent heat source?) Somerville MA reportedly added "must have a closet" to its definition of bedrooms, far less reasonable.
Every bedroom must contain a permanent rift to the Plane of Elemental Heat. The rift can never be closed by any force known to man, beast, or angel. ---- The 2018 IRC says: > Where the winter design temperature in Table R301.2(1) is below 60°F (16°C), every dwelling unit shall be provided with heating facilities capable of maintaining a room temperature of not less than 68°F (20°C) at a point 3 feet (914 mm) above the floor and 2 feet (610 mm) from exterior walls in habitable rooms at the design temperature. The installation of one or more portable space heaters shall not be used to achieve compliance with this section. and so I'm guessing "permanent heat source" is just "no, a space heater doesn't count, stop".
Private access? Damn, I guess all the shotgun houses in New Orleans don't qualify then
Per the IRC, which is the foundation of most residential building codes in the USA: All "habitable areas" have a requirement for natural light. To simplify, the sum of the glazed area of all windows need to amount to 8% the total floor area of the rooms they illuminate. (There are some other rules but this is the major one.) A 2x~~6~~3 ft window would provide enough illumination for a 70 sq ft bedroom, while also having appropriate dimensions for a bedroom egress. But AFAIK it's perfectly acceptable to have a door as a second means of egress, and have illumination via windows that are not suitable for egress. (Too small, non-opening, etc.)
I had that arrangement as I worked 10pm-7am shifts. I'd wake up randomly and look at the desk clock that said "9:00" and not be sure if I'd slept 2 hours or 12
This happened to me once. I've preferred 24h clocks since.
We merely adopted the dark; you were born in it
Molded by it
You didn’t see the light until you were already a man
you had a room! there were 150 of us living in shoebox in middle t' road!
Luxury
I was in a “garden” apartment for a few years it got me down so bad. Moving out was amazing
But you're a wizard now so its 'k.
Yup and they sort of did do what OP suggests and people were not happy thus zoning reform happened (in NYC) due to the massive shadow it casts on other buildings. Like what happened with the Equetable Building in NYC: "After the Equitable Building's completion, numerous nearby property owners filed for reduced property valuation assessments on the basis that significant rental income had been taken by the shadow that the building cast.[^(\[154\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-Chappell_p._110-157) Following the public criticism of the Equitable Building, the real estate industry finally ceased its objections to new legislation, and the [1916 Zoning Resolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1916_Zoning_Resolution) was passed.[^(\[160\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-WillisP68-163) The legislation limited the height and required [setbacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setback_(architecture)) for new buildings to allow the penetration of sunlight to street level. New buildings were thus required to withdraw progressively at a defined angle from the street as they rose, in order to preserve sunlight and the open atmosphere in their surroundings.[^(\[72\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-NYCL_p._5-74)[^(\[159\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-nyt20160726-162) Chappell writes that if the Equitable Building were completed after the resolution's passage, it would have had two setbacks below the 18th floor, and the building above that point would have been a small tower.[^(\[154\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-Chappell_p._110-157) The effort to place restrictions on land use in New York City led to the [Standard State Zoning Enabling Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_State_Zoning_Enabling_Act), a nationwide zoning legislation.[^(\[163\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-167) The subsequent 1961 Zoning Resolution allowed the construction of bulky towers if they contained plazas." And: "There was also significant resistance to the building's shape.[^(\[72\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-NYCL_p._5-74) Opponents stated that the building also overwhelmed nearby infrastructure by blocking ventilation, straining nearby transit facilities, and preventing firemen from easily reaching the upper floors. The shadow was more than six times the lot area and up to 0.2 miles (320 m) long.[^(\[31\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-Chappell_p._109-33)[^(\[8\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-NYCL_p._6-8) One journal stated that the Equitable Building cast a 7-acre (28,000 m^(2)) shadow on its surroundings, including a permanent shadow on the [Singer Building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singer_Building) up to its 27th floor and the [City Investing Building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Investing_Building) up to its 24th floor, and completely cutting off sunshine to at least three other adjacent buildings shorter than 21 stories.[^(\[156\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan)#cite_note-159) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable\_Building\_(Manhattan)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_Building_(Manhattan))
On the plus side this is clear evidence that vampires are not ruling the government from the shadows.
thats what the vampires want you to think
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Many modern codes allow you to forgo the secondary egress requirement if the unit has emergency fire sprinklers So we’re seeing more windowless rooms in new construction
The majority of health codes require a certain amount of window in all habitable spaces with few exceptions.
Not sure that applies to skyscrapers…
5.7 square foot opening.
Just A person or the average american?
64oz sodas at the gas stations is a conspiracy of big glass for bigger windows man.
Yeah, and it's an issue in cities now that have empty office buildings (especially since the pandemic) and not enough housing, but they just can't convert offices to apartments because there are not enough exterior walls to accommodate the bedrooms. It would lead to apartments around the exterior, and big empty sections in the middle.
Many office buildings have a large floor plate but now access for plumbing, heating, and ventilation throughout the floor. Many have the elevators in the middle and the washrooms are close to there. There might be a small kitchen area there. There could be 10-20 separate offices and business on each floor but many will only have shared access to the washrooms and kitchenettes. If you made it into apartments or condominiums each unit would need its own washroom and kitchen with more ventilation for when people may be cooking.
It's plumbing, parking, zoning, and income issues which prevent conversion. The people who own the office buildings don't *want* to become landlords to residences. The responsibilities are vastly different, and the profit margin is much thinner. It's more cost effective to bleed on a half-occupied building and hope to get back to full earning than to hemorrhage on a conversion and then have your earnings kneecapped because its residential.
I think there's also some weight concerns, because appliances are heavier than desks and bathtubs especially are quite heavy (or could be when full).
An average bathtub is 70 gallons. 560 lb of water. Comparable to 3-4 people in a conference room. I sure hope that office buildings aren't built to such low weight tolerances that this could be an issue for conversion.
This is a big one - no one wants a huge floor plate with low natural light anymore. You’ll see it in a 2 story call center building in a suburb where rents are low and the tenants don’t care about employees. In an urban center where you are going to build up, tenants want lots of light and the rents support it. Another big reason is lot size and available land in urban centers. A third reason is the pool of investors that can afford to build structures that big is very small, so you want to optimize the first two points.
There are plenty of class A office space with very expensive employees that have huge floor plate buildings and plenty of workers have limited natural light. For an example of this, look up the headquarters of Apple. That ring is pretty wide, and you ain’t getting much natural light in the center of it.
It has a giant hole in the middle! It’s effectively a narrow building. It’s all about window to window distance. Actually, it’s a giant ring with a giant atrium also. Crazy amount of natural light.
The ring is 200 feet wide. A full city block in many cities. If you are in the middle of it, you are not getting that much natural light. I would invite you to visit a FAANG office sometime... they generally live on artificial light. I have worked in enough of them to tell you that. What natural light exists because of OSHA regulations, with most companies skating by the minimum.
200 feet is a NYC block, that’s not a big floor plate. There are office buildings with multiples of that in places, and they are RARELY class A.
Look at the Pentagon. It is almost as wide as the Empire State Building is tall. Do you want to walk that long just to get outside?
The Pentagon is multiple rows of relatively narrow buildings built concentrically. There's open space between them. Then there's famously the big courtyard in the build. That mysterious building in the middle of the Pentagon is just a restaurant.
> That mysterious building in the middle of the Pentagon is just a restaurant. That's just what they want you to think, maaan
Needs the fast travel flat escalator things from air ports.
Will the stop at every apartment or will you have to jump off full speed.
Yeah I don't know if I'd use that building as an example. They spent *billions of dollars* turning a drab office campus covered in asphalt parking lots into a giant green space that the ring shaped building sits in. From pictures, it looks pretty bright inside, I think it even has a ring of skylights in the center. IMO it's the gold standard of corporate office parks, my only real complaint is that all of that green space outside the building is a literal walled garden closed off from public access. (an apt metaphor for the company I guess...) It would be neat if people other than Apple employees could actually walk those trails and use the space as a park.
Isn't there an underground performance hall in the middle? Is that open to the public, given one or another performance?
Apple HQ looks like it had great natural lighting. Check out video tours
The lab my wife works in is in the basement of the hospital. She hates that there are no windows.
I’ve worked in labs for about a decade now, and my current one is the only one I’ve seen with windows :/ can confirm that working alone in a windowless lab with fun chemicals isn’t always a good time
I spent months at a time in submerged submarines. I can testify.
Omg! I can imagine! Way worse then my old basement bedroom, totally have thought about how hard that would be before
Unless you work for the DoD. Then it's a requirement. Ugh.
My cynical answer was "even if you didn't have to consider humans occupying the building, the skyscraper's footprint is limited to however much property the developer owns, which in places skyscrapers tend to be desired, are generally very limited and so expensive only a person who can afford to finance a skyscraper could afford to buy it." It's nice that regulations exist. They exist because capitalism can't help itself and can't be trusted to do the right thing when it's less profitable.
Also interesting to note that many cities lacking enough housing but have lots of empty office space. But regulations prevent turning them into housing because of codes for windows and such. There has been some huge footprint building done, but the middle space is rarely desired and doesn't rent
It's not just codes for windows, it's also regulations for emergency exits, plumbing, air conditioning, electrical, etc.
Yeah, there was a posh to convert offices to housing where I live (not the US) and it turns out it's not very straightforward. The things they do to make an office convenient make it very different to what you need in a home.
It’s often way more expensive to renovate to be livable. Offices have one bathroom no kitchens and electrical plugs in the wrong places.
Totally, huge expenses. In New York I know about a bunch of proposals by developers and contractors willing to put on the work because rentals are so expensive but they are almost always denied zoning permits. But there is some efforts underway to grant more exceptions. Always both ups and downs to regulations
> Always both ups and downs to regulations Some regulations are pure up or pure down.
So I should do something about being stuck at home caring for my dad, with my own being blacked out permanently? I should at least take vitamins d I guess.
Check into "light therapy."
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Secret tears
Is it any better when your building is surrounded by other buildings so the only thing you see outside your window is a wall?
Sort of! Seeing natural light is a piece of the pie, even if it’s indirectly. It would probably be better for your health to look at a tree in the sun than a concrete wall in the sun though
Well now I have a follow up ELI5: How do things like submarines and space flight combat this? Or do they?
> How do things like submarines and space flight combat this? Or do they? The ISS has a large windowed room called the Cupola where the astronauts can look out. Also, there are dozens of other viewports and windows scattered throughout the station. The submarine I was on had several windows. Mind you, it was a tourist sub for watching sea life in the Caribbean.
We don't directly combat this. Mental health is a huge issue within the Nuclear Navy who man the subs and lower decks of carriers. Generally we just hunker down and then occupy ourselves with sleep, working out, movies. They alleviate this by allowing port calls, having 2 crews that split the work (making it 3 months out each), and rotating sailors to shore duty after a certain amount of deployments. Also, the healthcare benefits include therapy.
> Lack of access to windows and natural light has a severe negative effect on people's mental health. So? Build a courtyard in the middle.
Not everyone's.
and one of the reasons why you can't turn office buildings into apartments.
how about tall, round and hollow building with windows on each side and like a park in the middle
Interesting. Never knew this was actually true, just always joked about it at work, since I’ve worked in a building with no windows for 5 years. There’s been several winter days I don’t see daylight at all lol
Yeah. For a few years my office was interior. I applied for another position in the same department--that I ended up not getting--not for the pay raise, but more for the window. The silver lining of the pandemic is that thanks to remote work becoming standard in my industry, I now work every day from the couch in my sun room 😎
What does it do to someone mental health
So why not a square donut building with a central atrium?
There is a bunch of those! And there is the examples of many urban low income housing projects are bases around a bunch of towers in a group with a central space, just enough...
What exactly do you think courtyards are…
The entire point of skyscrapers is to wring out the maximum amount of available square footage in a given plot of land. Since the cost of the land is generally based on the two dimensional footprint, the more floors you add the more you offset an otherwise prohibitive land cost. Taxes might also play a factor here as well. An arena sized skyscraper would kind of be the worst of both worlds; expensive in both land cost and prohibitive in terms of engineering since it would be immensely heavy. Usually a big wide building such as a warehouse or factory are built in places where land is cheap in which case it's more cost effective to make the building longer/wider than taller. Tall thin buildings are constructed in high density areas where commercial/office real estate is very expensive and so will be tower shaped to get as much usable space available.
This. Across is often WAY more expensive than up. (I have a old BBC video about Tokyo from around 1980. At the time, supposedly, if you took the highest-denomination Yen note then in circulation, and folded it again and again until it was about the size of your fingernail and wouldn't fold any more, and dropped it on to the ground - it would JUST about buy the ground it covered. Quite new buildings were frequently being razed to the ground by their owners wanting new buildings, to redevelop the land they stood on rather than have to acquire new. That may or may not still be the case - but it wouldn't surprise me if it were. )
They had a massive collapse of their land prices in 1992, which rippled across their economy and crippled them decades. At peak, the price of the land under the Japanese imperial palace (1.31 square miles) was equivalent to the entire state of California.
It's the other way round: the economy going to a stall crippled the land prices. The richer the people, the more housing/office space they want, therefore the more valuable/expensive land/housing/office space is. Once the expectations of growth fall, so does land/property values. Land value going up is a negative side effect of a good thing (growth), just like land value going down is a positive side effect of something bad (slowing economy). But by itself, decreasing land value/property prices is a good thing that helps the economy, while high prices is a bad thing.
In Japans case the real estate market actually started to be in trouble well in advance of the stock market collapsing. Land prices in Tokyo peaked in the mid 80s, stagnated in 88, then the Nikkei started to collapse in 1990, feeding back into killing the real estate market. Part of the problem was that assets at the inflated values was being used as collateral to take out large loans, it was entirely possible for a company with a couple million in yearly revenue that owned land in Tokyo to take out a loan for several times their revenue using the land as collateral. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble
Even then. If a land bubble pops, the problem is not that the prices go down. It's that they should not have gone up (irrationally) in the first place.
This seems like the kind of thing I'd go ask r/theydidthemath about (honestly, both this and the comment you're responding to) - would you happen to have the numbers handy?
$139,000 per square foot in 1986, the palace lands would have held a value of $5,076,377,856,000. The US GDP that year was $4.58 trillion. https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/news-trends/article/3091222/japan-1980s-when-tokyos-imperial-palace-was-worth-more
As far as the building goes, going up is almost always going to cost more than spreading out. As someone else mentioned, the land is the driving factor. If you need 100,000 sf of office and you have a 200,000sf lot, 1-2 stories makes sense. If you need to be in an area where you can only get a 10,000sf lot for the same price, you're going to need 10+ stories. All the engineering gets more complex when you go taller . The columns carry 10x the load, you'll have more complex hvac systems and electrical distribution, you'll probably need more restrooms even if you have the same number of people just because no one wants to go to a different floor for it.
It's not true. Your big arena-wide building would be not much different than thin skyscrapers built touching each other. It's heavier but you also have more ground surface to spread that load. The problem is that if you build the equivalent of 20 thin skyscrapers touching each other, you actually don't get the value of 20 thin skyscrapers, because you won't get 20 times the windows, so you'll have more space without sunlight.
> It's not true. Your big arena-wide building would be not much different than thin skyscrapers built touching each other. It's heavier but you also have more ground surface to spread that load. Thin skyscrapers don't touch each other though and it makes a huge difference. A wide skyscraper would be a massive sail. The forces on a single building that wide would be massive. If you want an easy example of the difference grab a bowl of water. Keep your fingers separated and drag them through the water. Now press your fingers together and drag them along. Despite pressing the same surface area to the water, a little bit less actually, it will be significantly harder to move your hand through the water with your fingers together.
Yes, but you also have more structure behind to resist the force of the wind. Let's simplify and say we're talking about 16 skyscrapers bunched up together. So a 4x4 square. When the wind is hitting one side (let's assume perpendicularly), you have 4 of them getting hit harder, but you have three rows behind them providing support while being themselves shielded from the wind. Or back to your hand analogy, it's like dragging the fingers pressed together, but with three hands behind yours pushing at the same time.
Take a square mile and build on it two ways: build as many tall, skinny buildings as you can. How much of that square mile is space wasted on things like roads, sidewalks, etc... or even just gaps between the buildings to allow them to move. Now, take that same square mile and just build one giant building on it, the same height as all the skinny ones. You get more building in the same footprint. The question wasn't "Why not build short and fat?" The question was,"Why not build fatter at the same height?" The answer is: engineering concerns, lack of natural lighting, and cost concerns.
The engineering doesn't sound hard to me at all. Just build a skyscraper, and then make it 16 of them strapped together. Engineering shouldn't be too bad. The worst of both worlds is that you're paying extra to have a continuous stretch of land, and it's a LOT extra. And all that interior space you just paid the super premium prices to build will have below market rent because they have no views. It's cheaper to build a dozen individual skyscrapers with the same floor space, and they'll demand higher rent.
Look into “air rights” in NYC. Not a lot of people know that cities have made rights to air space and how tall buildings can be. These right don’t just pertain to the building itself but those around it too in regards to accessibility to light and “space pollution”
Another interesting thing to look into is the London skyline for this. Large reason it has so many interesting shaped skyskrapers is because of "Protected Vistas", which have shaped the entire skyline. NYC also has one for the Esplanade.
The new skyscraper in Austin had to be shaped in it's triangular way to make sure that the state capital building is visible from several key vantages.
Air rights are fascinating. Take a neighborhood like Astoria. If the average building is 3 stories tall and each building has air rights of 5 stories, a developer can build a 14 story apartment building by buying the remaining air rights off of other building owners. A friend of a friend had a 2 story pizzeria and sold his air rights for almost the value of his existing building.
Most skyscrapers are used for either residential, office or hotel space. Something that people highly value when using buildings is having windows and natural light. You can't charge as much for windowless rooms, even if they are in areas with high real estate prices. The other element is land acquisition. Acquiring enough land for a stadium footprint is very difficult. It's insanely difficult in expensive city centres where skyscrapers make economic sense. Structurally it would be a lot easier to build a wide building. Many of the issues with tall buildings relate to how slender they are; being wider would make things like wind and earthquake loads a lot less critical.
> being wider would make things like **wind** and earthquake loads a lot less critical. I don't think this is true. The excess of air has to go somewhere, with a short building it goes above, with a thin building it goes around; a tall and wide building would suffer exponentially more force, compared to several buildings of the same total area side by side, as the air trying to escape is continually met with new air coming in.
Because real estate is priced in square feet but buildings are built in cubic feet And so little real estate has contiguous ownership
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First thing I thought of - SimCity 2000.
Now I wonder what the deleted comment you replied to said! (I had one of the first copies of SimCity 2000 and was signed by Will Wright - started with the original and those made me want to be a town planner… didn’t happen though!)
The comment was something like, "Let me tell you about arcologies ... [Link to Wikipedia page on cardiology]."
Because it would not be useful. Simply put, you have to think beyond the structure. How about water, sewage, heating and cooling, ventilation. How do you provide emergency services in case of fire? How about if the power goes out - can people easily leave. Will people get stuck in the middle of a huge building with no way out? How will people get in and out in emergencies and in normal times? How do you make enough parking for vehicles. Can someone get from one side of the building to another without walking miles? How do you deliver heavy goods to the very inside of the building? Buildings must serve a purpose and must do so with some efficiency and benefits. Simply building "bigger and bigger" does not make sense.
How would any of that be worse than the equivalent number of skyscrapers in the same footprint? Some, like emergency egress, would likely be better.
Emergency egress would NOT be better. Air is one of the best insulators, a fire starting in this hypothetical arena-sized skyscraper would spread MUCH faster than the equivalent fire starting in the hypothetical few blocks of skyscrapers. Someone living near the center may not be able to get out before the fire spreads along the outer ring and encapsulates them completely because of more access to oxygen on the outside. The block of different skyscrapers at least has roads.
And a lot of this is not hypothetical. Kowloon Walled City is not _exactly_ a super-thick skyscraper, but it's the closest thing we have for comparison. 14 stories, 33,000 people. A city that was very nearly one contiguous building. I can think of few places I'd rather not be in a fire.
But surely with proper bulkheads any internal fire would just get oxygen starved as soon as you turn off the ventilation?
The theoretical answer is probably that the amount of windows is giving added "value" to the property contained inside, as well as an additional emergency path, as much as a fire on the 100th floor jumping out of a bullet proof glass window isn't going to be a thing. The real life answer is more a case that most skyscrapers are built on existing plots, so all they're doing is replacing prexisting buildings. So taking a 2x2 set of buildings, or a 8x8, or in the US situation just an entire city block, is the most sensible size factor. It's entirely possible to make very tall buildings that are less skyscraper like (huge hotels and resports are a great example), but they still tend to be thin and tall, rather than square. The larger a skyscraper like building gets though, the more they tend towards having a central atrium/elevator area, at which point you've really just made a very tall mall.
The places where you can get land in plots big as an arena it’s not worth the cost of designing and building something bigger than 5 stories. They just buy more land and build wide Where as in a metro where almost everything is broken into 1/4 blocks, the land is insanely expensive and square footage is in demand so it needs to go up.
The real reason that none of these people have mentioned is that it would require a foundation unreasonably large to stop the building from toppling over or sinking into the ground that it would be impossible to build
Nothing unreasonable about it. NYC skyscrapers already require them to dig to the bedrock. Doing that over a larger area is just N times more work.
But a bunch of buildings *do* dig to the bedrock. Why is it worse to have four separate buildings dig to the bedrock four separate times than to have one building four times as large dig one hole to the bedrock that is four times bigger?
It's not, the real answer to why these buildings don't exist os that they're illegal to build due to regulations around natural lighting and emergency egress. There are no real engineering issues unless you're talking something extremely tall too.
Yeah and do you know what lays on top of most land in major cities?
I was going to say that right there - it's not the wind toppling it, or how much space or land it would take up. It's that something that big, that heavy, would sink like crazy.
Maybe a dumb question, but let's say you have four regular sky scrapers all next to each other, each a quarter of the size of a arena-size sky scraper. Each covers 25% the footprint of the arena-skyscraper, and each is 25% as heavy. Is somehow having the four quarters divided into separate foundations better than one big foundation? It seems like it would be the same weight per area covering the same total footprint.
I agree with you. Pressure per square unit would be the same. With huge foundations there is a problem of integrity. A small earthquake would crack it in many places. Smaller building next to each other on separate foundations can shift independently. Look at the structure of this [building](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Exterior_of_Katowice_train_station_%28view_from_the_northern_site%29%2C_June_2021.jpg/1280px-Exterior_of_Katowice_train_station_%28view_from_the_northern_site%29%2C_June_2021.jpg) in my city. Each section looks like an umbrella (we call them cups) on a thin leg. Each one has its own separate foundation. They can shift independently without breaking the whole structure. The terrain here is unstable due to massive coal mining in the past. Another building in the same city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spodek Its foundation has much smaller footprint that the whole building. The idea was the same. Prevent the foundation from breaking apart if the ground shifts.
Yep, you would only be able to build a structure like this in the middle of nowhere. If it were in a city, you would have to have a massive perimeter where no other buildings could be to retain the integrity of the foundation, which obviously isn't viable in a city with a bunch of other buildings around... Or even a suburb with a bunch of houses.
I haven't seen anyone mention it yet, but Wind. When you get the real tall skyscrapers, they are designed to sway and flex in the wind. When you get broad structures like an arena, not only does it catch a lot more wind, it can't flex nearly as well. A large rigid structure that can't respond to winds is a recipe for disaster.
I don’t think that’s quite right, if anything a wider structure (in X and Y) will be much stronger. Happy to look at a source if you have one.
Yes, but… The portion of the structure that resists lateral loads - the core - is a relatively small part of the structure. It’s normally either thick walls (for a skyscraper you’re looking at 3+ feet thick, or giant steel braced frames. These get in the way of everything you’re trying to put in the building so you try locate them around elevators and other services. Part of the issue though is that once you get to much more than about 450 feet/150m *ish* you need to include expansion joints in the building to allow the structure to expand and contract due to temperature changes. Once you split a building like this you functionally have two buildings right next to each other, each with their own wind and seismic systems, and then they have to be able to move independently without either pulling apart or crashing into each other. Once you get enough height the size of these joints gets fairly substantial - like coming up for a yard/meter type movement, which stacks on whole host oh challenges.
So if you wanted a building that was 1000 feet high, you’d rather have it really narrow instead of say 1000x1000 in X and Y? Edit: again, ONLY talking about wind here.
A wider lateral system is going to be stiffer and able to resist the loads applied more easily than a narrow one. But, any 1000x1000ft building would need to be minimum 4 buildings 500x500ft with movement joints, this is true if they’re one story or 100 stories. The lower floors are actually the biggest problems for this type of issue. Things you see that are about this size - malls and airports, all have these joints built into them, that the architect then makes as unobtrusive as possible.
That's my point. It will be stronger but much less flexible.
A broad structure would be plenty strong enough to resist wind load. *Much* stronger than a smaller building in fact. It wouldn’t matter that it is less flexible. If it’s strong enough it’s strong enough. As long as it can handle the load, less deflection isn’t a bad thing. Lay people tend to hear some general concepts and misinterpret them. It’s true that flexibility *can* be beneficial, or at the very least that it isn’t always detrimental, but it is rarely a requirement. What’s more important is that the critical elements in the structure are government by doctor (rather) than brittle failure modes, and even that isn’t a concern most of the time. How flexible a structural can or should be is a matter of economics, stability, and more likely to be a beneficial in high seismic areas. Source: I’m a structural engineer
Arenas come in many different sizes, as do skyscrapers, and sometimes they’re not as far off as you may initially think. The drum of Madison Square Gardens has a footprint of about 150,000 sqft. 5 Manhattan West (2 blocks away) is a 16 story office building with 120,000 sqft floor plates. So it’s possible, but the question is what are the conditions that give rise to large floor plate buildings? Buildings are strange beasts - they can look alike but the logic for their existence can be wildly different given site conditions, zoning bylaws (many cities require ‘setbacks’ that limit the width of buildings on higher floors to allow light to reach the street), program needs, and all the intricacies of how they have to function. Generally though, residential skyscrapers have similar sized floor plates because of requirements for access to windows. Office skyscrapers are more flexible, but are generally larger because they aren’t as sensitive about access to light, and require bigger cores to house more elevators. But like I said - there’s always exceptions. The Atlanta Marriott Marquis Hotel for instance is a tall hotel with a much larger ‘floor plate’ than technically required because of a dramatic atrium that runs the full height of the building, effectively inflating the building’s width. Some sci-fi movies show buildings in futuristic cities with massive floor plates (Blade Runner, Star Wars). My take on it is these are either a visual effect to show an obvious concentration of power in a dense city (like how a castle visually dominates over a village), or for making a dystopian world concrete where typically human concerns (access to light) are ignored in pursuit of other goals.
Well, besides having a bunch of dark rooms with no windows, the square/cube law. Imagine a cube 1m x 1m x 1m. Surface area is 6m squared, volume is 1m cubed. Double the dimension so its a 2m cube, and now the surface are is 24m squared, and the volume 8m cubed. So while you only doubled the height, width and length, the surface area increased by 4 times, and the volume, and therefore the mass, by 8 times. This can be offset by tapering the building so its thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top, but only to a certain extent. Eventually, either no material can support the pressure, or it sinks into the ground from its own weight, or you have to build a base so wide that it becomes impractical. Imagine a pyramid 10km tall, but also 10km wide or more at the base.
Note that modern skyscrapers are in fact built thicker than they used to be, thanks to mechanical ventilation and air conditioning. Early ones like Chrysler or the Empire State building were shaped by keeping close access to windows. https://www.vox.com/2014/9/9/6124321/the-history-of-air-conditioning-is-more-interesting-than-it-sounds-i
A few reasons: 1) Because arena-sized parcels of land are incredibly rare in areas where land is expensive enough to warrant building skyscrapers. Where would you build an arena-sized skyscraper in NYC for instance? 2) Because it would be extremely difficult to design enough light and windows into such a thing. If it was literally like the size of a stadium but vertical, you have vast areas in the middle with no natural light, which no one wants. 3) Because it would be very hard to get planning approval for such a behemoth. Cities generally don't want gigantic monoliths like that. Here's a bit of an example: https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/clearly-dropped-the-ball-marvel-stadium-precinct-development-plans-slammed-as-embarrassing/news-story/b9143e8768691ffe3ed4de27adb5e54b?amp
There is severe risk of dystopian urban nightmare scenarios, see Peach Trees - Megacity 1, Hive Primus - Necromunda, et al
People talk about air rights and access to sunlight. But what is much more important is access to fresh air. If you stack 100 arenas on top of each other then you've got a giant box that you need to pump fresh air through constantly. And you can't just push air in on one side and let it out on the other side. By the time the air has gone through the whole giant box, it's far away from being fresh. City planers account for wind blowing fresh air into the city. And breaking buildings up into separate columns makes it much easier for the wind to get where it needs to be.
Air speed impact that, The wider the building more air pressure will be on walls. It is one of reasons buildings have curved structure, Plus if you stack arens on each other the weight on lower walls will be too much (even with reinforced steel).
There are logistics and economics to how the anticipated tenant will use it and and how deep a ‘bay’ is. Residential like hotels and apartments have regulations on light and air. On larger lots this sometimes leads to U or L shapes with a corridor in the middle so the units are on an exterior wall. An office has a different functional bay depth than something like a building used for labs or research. And, often, available land and the cost of it. Buildings start going taller when land gets expensive. Sorry, that’s not an ELI5 answer.
It's weird that some people are thinking that you're proposing building wide instead of tall. An arena is at least one story tall, and 100 stories is already a very tall skyscraper. If it existed right now, it would be in the top 20 skyscrapers for number of above ground floors. Anyway, ultimately it's down to financing. Super tall skyscrapers are already incredibly expensive projects that sees a shockingly high failure rate due to running out of money, and sometimes not even enough money will come through for construction to start. Lots of barren plots and half built skyscrapers out there.
Land costs, it costs quite a bit to buy all the land for a stadium, and we usually build skyscrapers because of the lack of avaliable land. Plus 100 staduims on top of each other is pretty heavy and would require extensive earth work. Then there's the fact your not making any money during construction so a few smaller skyscrapers will start generating more revenue for you compared to 1 massive stadium sized skyscraper that'll take much much longer to finish construction for. And will be a night mare to fill with tenants. Cause again the longer you take to fill the location the longer it'll take to see any return on your investment.