Your thoughts: Tallest Building

[jmjselect 0]

After looking at some comparison charts of the tallest buildings, I had noticed how tall the sears tower is(not counting the antennas) compared to the petronus(sp?) and the taipei with the spires.


I heard that there's actually 4 categories on tallest building,
-tallest(including that stupid spire crap)
-tallest overall
-tallest occupied floor
-tallest something to do with an elevator I think.


the sears tower holds 3/4 of the tallest cats. built some 40 years ago people still can't build a scraper as tall(occupied floor wise).


I was just wondering what your thoughts are on the category thing and which tower is actually the Tallest

[pjot 20]

I think occupied floor should be accurate, or tallest place you can get to without climbing ladders or anything like that. However people CAN build a taller building than the sears tower it's just a matter of who's gonna pay for it.

[the_SIMtastik_One 3]

The categories don't phase me one way or the other, but I have the most respect for the tallest overall building without counting the spire. By the way, have you ever heard of the burj dubai? Google it if you've never heard of it.

[sim-ple 1]

For your information: I am an architect and real estate developer living and working in Dubai. Presently, the world's tallest building and man made structure is under construction in Dubai by Emaar and called Burj Dubai. The Burj Dubai final height is a jeaslously guarded secret but unofficially they are saying it will be 160 floors and more than 700 meters tall. There are rumors in the market that it could go as high as 900 meters. Emaar definitely wants to be the tallest for a long time to come.

 

For more info do a Google search for Emaar (the developer) or Burj Dubai (the name of the project).

 

You may also go here for a rendering and some statistics:

http://www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=182168

 

Imagine this as the ULTIMATE reward lot.

[sim-ple 1]

Sorry, one more point, the building is currently up to level 26. I pass it every day. Soon it will begin to command the skyline.

 

I remember when they were building the John Hancock in Chicago, I was attending the University of Illinois in Chicago. One day as I was heading to the subway after class, I saw a massive cloud pass right through the steel super structure when it was nearing its final height. I wish I had a camara with me.

 

Slight chance of that happening here however, the sun is always shining 365 days per year.

[cameron1991 0]

I didnt think buildings could get much taller because the more floors you have, then the more elevators you need to have which means they will take up more and more floor space. And then you have to get businesses to lease the space which will be VERY expensive becuase you have a giant debt to pay off so I dont think this building will be very economical.

[magpieshooter 1]

Burj Bubai is actually residential (set to overtake Taipai 101, Taiwan as worlds tallest tower and Q1 on the Gold Coast, Australia as the worlds tallest residential tower).

It will also have the world's largest shopping mall at the base (overtaking West Edmonton)

[sim-ple 1]

Just a point on the elevator issue and the viability of the building, it should be noted that vertical transportation issues are always the most critical to deal with when you start going over about 50 floors. There are several ways to deal with it which is well beyond the limited scope of this forum. The movement of men and materials during construction and the handling of occupants later are the first major obstacle to over come. SOM are masters at it and the big elevator companies are more than prepared to come up with solutions.

 

As for the viability, the tower will be mixed-use with the last residential floor at 101. They have been selling residential andf office space for the past year or so and it is going quite well. There are able to get prices that are more than double the going average in surrounding projects.

 

Tall buildings have historically proven to be uneconomical, at least in the early going. The push to go vertical has always been based more on ego than economics. We like to refer to this type of architecture as Big D*** architecture becasue its driven by mine is bigger than yours mentality.

 

BTW... also located at the base of this enormous tower is the world's first Armani hotel as well. My friend is handling the Interior Design of the hotel and he says it's a bloody nightmere with so many different sizes to accomodate the odd floor configuration.

 

Only time will tell if its a success. But one thing I can say for sure, they have the will and desire to make it a success and I doubt the Royals will allow a failure of any kind. As long as it breakseven, they will be happy.

[Duke87 1,070]

I prefer to count to whatver the highest point off the ground is on the structure itself. So yes, spires get included in the height, but antennae don't. This is the most common way of measuring tallest building

Of course, the CN Tower has been an issue for some people. Iyt technically doesn't qualify as a building because it for the most part lacks any interior space for usage of any kind. Still, it has for a while been the World's talledst free standing structure. However, Burj Dubai will overtake it.

 

Actually, if you want to be really lenient in your judging, you can say that the world's tallest man made object is actually a radio tower in south dakota. It's well over 2,000 feet tall, and it's in the middle of nowhere. The catch is, it's just a radio tower. It doesn't even stand on it's own. It's kept vertical by tension cables. Cut one of them, and over it goes.

[jmjselect 0]

Date: 2/15/2006 6:43:00 AM
Author: Duke87

I prefer to count to whatver the highest point off the ground is on the structure itself. So yes, spires get included in the height, but antennae don't. This is the most common way of measuring 'tallest building'

Of course, the CN Tower has been an issue for some people. Iyt technically doesn't qualify as a building because it for the most part lacks any interior space for usage of any kind. Still, it has for a while been the 'World's talledst free standing structure'. However, Burj Dubai will overtake it.

Actually, if you want to be really lenient in your judging, you can say that the 'world's tallest man made object' is actually a radio tower in south dakota. It's well over 2,000 feet tall, and it's in the middle of nowhere. The catch is, it's just a radio tower. It doesn't even stand on it's own. It's kept vertical by tension cables. Cut one of them, and over it goes.

quote>


isn't an antenna apart of the structure? I think its kinda cheap to put a spire on top of a building to just barely go past a building(without counting the antenna).
i dont know...


anyways didn't know about the radio tower, haha america still has the biggest D***

[justanothersim86 83]

I never got that either, aren't antenna's a part of the structure? Cause when I see all these new tower's spires, they simply just look like glorified antenna's to me.

The CN Tower does have the worlds highest public observation deck from street level.

[GAT-X105 3]

Yeah, an antenna actually has a function, while a spire is just pretty. Why SHOULDN'T an antenna count?

I heard once that the only reason spires count and not antennae, was that they wanted Petronas Towers to be taller than Sears Tower.

[SeventhSeal17 0]

The worlds tallest is current Taipei 101 in, you guessed it, Taipei, Taiwan.  Personally I think that it is a, for lack of a better word, stupid building built in the wrong district of a not yet world class city.  It is not even near downtown Taipei area, which according to the developers  (C.Y. and Lee) was to spark a new skyline away from the over developed downtown area.  Well, that remains to be seen,

[Duke87 1,070]

Well, from an Engineering and Architecture point of view, spires are part of the design and incorporated with the structure. Antennas are just stuck on top of the sructure. It has absolutely nothing to do with Malaysia wanting to be able to say their building was taller. Such practice was in place long before then. The antennae on the sears tower never were included in its height. The antenna on the empire state building was never included in it's height. It's nothing new.

[sim-ple 1]

Not to stir up another fire storm, but... oh well, might as well stir it up anyway... It should be noted that most of the latest aspirants to be the tallest in the world actually pale in comparison to the former World Trade Center and the Sears Tower when it comes to gross building area. Most of the Asian towers are actually quite small with very small floor plates. I was in the Petronis Tower a few years ago and was struck by the very small floor and the short distance betwee the core walls and the exterior curtainwall. Taipei !)! is another building with small floor plates. Within Asia there are very few tenants that require large floor plates, as opposed to the US where Insurance companies, stock brokerages, banks and so forth require large floors for efficiency.

 

The actual economics of the Asian model is actually quite tenuous and don't stack up to the normal investor returns required in the West.

 

If you built the same floor plates in Asia these toqwers would struggle to reach the 35th floor.

 

Burj Dubai, on the otherhand, is huge in all respects. The building will total more than 450,000 square meters of floor area, larger than Sears and perhaps more comparable to WTC.

 

I just read this interesting statistic - all 64 floors of residential condos sold out in 8-hours!!!

[jmjselect 0]

Yeah I had noticed that to sim-ple, the sears tower looks muscular and the petro. and the tapae. looks like weak(not saying that they are but in comparison to the west's towers).

I had noticed that hong kong likes to build tall muscular buildings too.



If the antennas were apart of the design of the sears tower(not sure if it was but wondering) can't it then be apart of the building and then counted?

honestly I don't like counting antennas or spires, I say count the highest occupied floor or any point on the building where people are regularlly conjugating.


if people are gonna use a spire, at what point are people gonna start building a CN type thing on top of high-rises to save $$$ and just cheaplly say HAHA I have the tallest building.

[Odainsaker 2,133]

I aways thought of it in terms of what was more fundamental to the design and structure.  Maybe a thought experiment will explain what that means better:

 

Consider abstractly a big bulbous onion dome.  It is obvious the fat bulbous mass of the dome is a fundamental part of the building, but what happens as the top of the fat dome swirls and narrows into its finial point?  At some point, the tightening part of the upper dome is too narrow for occupation, it may even be unreachable without elaborate equipment and ladders, and the whole effort is mostly decorative as a smooth hemispherical dome works just as well.  But is this increasingly narrow spire point still an integral part of the onion dome?  If it is not, then the dome is clearly and fundamentally incomplete.  Cut the ends off the onion.  We would also have to ask ourselves what is the cutoff where the narrowing part of the dome ceased to be a part of the structure--good luck finding that arbitrary point.

 

If bulbous domes narrowing into spindly finials is too much, try imagining a pyramid instead, and ask at what point towards the apex does the structure become too narrow for inhabitation and so functionally needless that it doesn't count towards the structure.  That would be lots of flat-topped pyramids.  But the apex of a pyramid is a fundamental part of the pyramid design, as is the finial of an onion dome.  In the same way, a spire, no matter how tenuously narrow according to our own arbitrarily imagined cutoffs, becomes an integral part of the building design.

 

Pure pyramids and onion domes are easy enough, but what of the myriad forms of the world's buildings.  Some taper, some are squat, some have sculpture, many have attached antennas that change in height every decade.  We can imagine the Petronas Towers without it finials, and it could be seen as complete enough for some tastes like that, afterall, not all tapering masses conceptually need end in narrow spires.  But now we are throwing in even more arbitrary and personal measures, for which the only real solution is to acknowledge the conception of the designer.  Cesar Pelli wanted to cap his tower design with spires, and whether or not we like his concept or motives, it is still enough that we must now recognize it as the building design.

 

The antennas on the Sears Tower are certainly huge, with a signicant load for which the building structure had to account, but their ultimate extent, their own internal engineering, their color, the number of protrusions and setbacks, etc., are not fundamental to the design of building itself.  Buildings gain and lose antenna masts all the time, or the aerials are reorganized as technology allows.  There is an idea of impermanence to them, regardless of their scale.  Indeed, we can redesign the antennas any number of times, extending or shortening them, and the building will still remain recognized as the familiar Sears Tower and is conceptually intact.  If we lopped off the old mooring mast of the Empire State Building, or flattened off the needlessly decorative steel taper and spire of the Chrysler Building, or removed the sculptural points of the Statue of Liberty's flame, they would not be the classic structures that we understand.

 

Hmmm...the Chrysler Building I think did the same thing, it gained its record by erecting a very narrow spire hidden within the steel pyramidal roof.  Those cheats!  If we can do it with the Chrysler Building, why can't the Malaysians do it, and what is so unfair and against-the-rules about gaining such bragging rights anyway?

 

Okay, rambling, but it is a way of arguing the point.  Try another exercise:  imagine a new muscular superskyscraper built next to the Sears Tower.  This hulking new building has a simple flat roof with no spires, projections, or antennas, but its heighest roof deck is only a dozen feet shorter than the heighest point of the of the Sears antenna, and tiers of office floors look down upon the Sears roofdeck far below.  Who is taller, and does the skinny antenna count?  It was only a dozen feet, so what if the new building instead also included a fat and gaudy spire whose tip was now heigher than the Sears antenna.  Now who is taller, and does the thick spire count?

 

[sim-ple 1]

Yet another way of looking at this...

 

All buildings, and structures for that matter, are erected for the purpose of fullfilling a need in the market and to provide a return on the invested capital for the owner(s). If we look at every building from the standpoint of whether the building's essential purpose is being served by the elements than we can either accept it as a part of the building or not. So if the buildings occupied floors serve the building's intended purpose than we count all the floors (even mechanical floors since they are an essential part of the operation of the building). If the element is for design and does not contribute in any way to the economic viability of the building than we should not count it.

 

The CNN tower, by way of example, was built for the sole purpose of broadcasting radio, TV and communications signals. The observation deck was merely an add-on to generate some additional revenue and take advantage of the structures height. In this case we should count the height to the vary top of the antena mast since that was the intended purpose.

 

Sears Tower was constructed as an office building and fills that role very well. The antenas were added to the top when it was feared that broadcast signals would be interrupted. I remember the shadow on my TV when the construction of Sears tower started to interfere with reception to the South of Chicago. They were added to satisfy the cities demands and not necessarily added for their intrinsic beuty. They have, over time, generated substantial revenue for the building owner and as such should qualify as a means of determining the height of the stucture. The owers wanted a return on their capital investment and the antennas help them achieve this.

 

Spires that are added to towers, such as Petronis,Empire State, Chrysler (as mentioned above) or Taipei 101 and a miriad of others, are not constructed for any purpose other than to enhance the design. As such, they provide no direct intrinsic value to the building. It is my opinion then, that these spires should not be counted as they are not a direct part of the overall income stream generated from the building and in fact represent a significant capital expenditure and on-going maintenance cost that must be born by the occupants of the building. So spires are an artifical way of generating height.

 

Also, one could ask the question, if the spire was removed would the building still function properly and meets its intended purpose. In most cases, if not all, you would have to answer yes, the building would still function quite well - in fact even better from an economic perspective. Would Sears Tower function just as well without the antenas, yes, but in the case of Sears, Chicagoans would suffer since the broadcasting towers do meet societies needs and consequently, become an integral part of the Tower's secondary purpose.

 

Just my two cents worth...