Tall Buildings And The City

The chaotic proliferation of skyscrapers in many cities around the world is contributing to a decline in placemaking. This book examines the role of skyscrapers and open spaces in promoting placemaking in the city of Chicago. Chicago’s skyscrapers tell an epic story of transformative architectural design, innovative engineering solutions, and bold entrepreneurial spirit. The city’s public plazas and open spaces attract visitors, breathe life, and bring balance into the cityscape. Using locational data from social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, along with imagery from Google Earth, fieldwork, direct observations, in-depth surveys, and the combined insights from architectural and urban design literature, this study reveals the roles that socio-spatial clusters of skyscrapers, public spaces, architecture, and artwork play to enhance placemaking in Chicago. The study illustrates how Chicago, as the birthplace of skyscrapers, remains a leading city in tall building integration and innovation. Focusing on some of the finest urban places in America, including the Chicago River, the Magnificent Mile, and the Chicago Loop, the book offers meaningful architectural and urban design lessons that are transferable to emerging skyscraper cities around the globe.

Drawing on the experience of several cities from different parts of the world, this text provides a global perspective on the urbanization phenomenon and tall building development, and examines their underlying logic, design drivers, contextual relationships and pitfalls.

As the ever-changing skylines of cities all over the world show, tall buildings are an increasingly important solution to accommodating growth more sustainably in today’s urban areas. Whether it is residential, a workplace or mixed use, the tower is both a statement of intent and the defining image for the new global city. The Tall Buildings Reference Book addresses all the issues of building tall, from the procurement stage through the design and construction process to new technologies and the building’s contribution to the urban habitat. A case study section highlights the latest, the most innovative, the greenest and the most inspirational tall buildings being constructed today. A team of over fifty experts in all aspects of building tall have contributed to the making of the Tall Buildings Reference Book, creating an unparalleled source of information and inspiration for architects, engineers and developers.

In recent years, the rapid pace of tall building construction has fostered a certain kind of placelessness, with many new tall buildings being built out of scale, context and place. By analyzing hundreds of tall buildings and by providing hundreds of visuals that inspire, stimulate and engage, Understanding Tall Buildings contends that well-designed tall buildings can rejuvenate cities, ignite economic activity, support social life and boost city pride. Although this book does not claim to possess all the solutions, it does propose specific tall building design guidelines that may help to promote placemaking. Through this work, it is the author’s hope that ill-conceived developments will become less common in the future and that good placemaking will become the norm, not the exception. This book is a must-read for students and practitioners working to create better tall buildings and better urban environments.

The Manhattan skyline is one of the great wonders of the modern world. But how and why did it form? Much has been written about the city's architecture and its general history, but little work has explored the economic forces that created the skyline. In Building the Skyline, Jason Barr chronicles the economic history of the Manhattan skyline. In the process, he debunks some widely held misconceptions about the city's history. Starting with Manhattan's natural and geological history, Barr moves on to how these formations influenced early land use and the development of neighborhoods, including the dense tenement neighborhoods of Five Points and the Lower East Side, and how these early decisions eventually impacted the location of skyscrapers built during the Skyscraper Revolution at the end of the 19th century. Barr then explores the economic history of skyscrapers and the skyline, investigating the reasons for their heights, frequencies, locations, and shapes. He discusses why skyscrapers emerged downtown and why they appeared three miles to the north in midtown-but not in between the two areas. Contrary to popular belief, this was not due to the depths of Manhattan's bedrock, nor the presence of Grand Central Station. Rather, midtown's emergence was a response to the economic and demographic forces that were taking place north of 14th Street after the Civil War. Building the Skyline also presents the first rigorous investigation of the causes of the building boom during the Roaring Twenties. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the boom was largely a rational response to the economic growth of the nation and city. The last chapter investigates the value of Manhattan Island and the relationship between skyscrapers and land prices. Finally, an Epilogue offers policy recommendations for a resilient and robust future skyline.

The Sustainable Tall Building: A Design Primer is an accessible and highly illustrated guide, which primes those involved in the design and research of tall buildings to dramatically improve their performance. Using a mixture of original research and analysis, best-practice design thinking and a detailed look at exemplar case studies, author Philip Oldfield takes the reader through the architectural ideas, engineering strategies and cutting-edge technologies that are available to the tall building design team. The book takes a global perspective, examining high-rise design in different climates, cultures and contexts. It considers common functions such as high-rise housing and offices, to more radical designs such as vertical farming and vertical cemeteries. Innovation is provided by examining not only the environmental performance of tall buildings but also their social sustainability, guiding the reader through strategies to create successful communities at height. The book starts by critically appraising the sustainability of tall building architecture past and present, before demonstrating innovative ways for future tall buildings to be designed. These include themes such as climatically responsive architecture, siting a tall building in the city, zero-carbon towers, skygardens and community spaces at height, sustainable structural systems and novel façades. In doing so, the book provides essential reading for architects, engineers, consultants, developers, researchers and students engaged with sustainable design and high-rise architecture.

With the majority of Earth's population now residing in urban areas, city-makers have an obligation to forge a more viable, sustainable urban habitat, with increased urban density playing an important role. Tall buildings need to be seen as integrated pieces of urban infrastructure, dedicated to improving quality of life in the city as a whole. This requires a cohesive, multi-disciplinary response.Providing a global overview of dense urban development, this book explores the projects, technologies, and approaches currently reshaping skylines and urban spaces worldwide. In this edition, innovations in the constituent disciplines that bring tall buildings to life, and even extend their lives-construction, the engineering of façades, fire & risk, geotechnical engineering, interior space, MEP, renovation, and structural engineering-are all explored. The Tall Buildings + Urban Habitat book is produced annually by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), the global authority on the inception, design, construction, and operation of tall buildings and future cities.

In a time of recession, the challenge of building and planning for tall buildings has become even more complex; the economics of development, legislative and planning frameworks, and the local politics of development must be navigated by those wishing to design and construct new tall buildings which fit within the fabric of their host cities. This book is a timely contribution to the debate about new tall buildings and their role and effect on our cities. It is divided into two main parts. In part one, the relationship between tall buildings and planning is outlined, followed by an exploration of the impacts that construction of tall buildings can have. It focuses, in particular, on the conservation debates that proposals for new tall buildings raise. The first part ends with an analysis of the way in which planning strategies have evolved to deal with the unique consequences of tall buildings on their urban locations. The second part of the book focuses on seven examples of medium-sized cities dealing with planning and conservation issues, and implications that arise from tall buildings. These have been chosen to reflect a wide range of methods to either encourage or to control tall buildings that cities are deploying. The case studies come from across the western world, covering England (Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Birmingham), Norway (Oslo), Ireland (Dublin) and Canada (Vancouver) and represent a broad spectrum of approaches to dealing with this issue. In drawing together the experiences of these varied cities, the book contributes to the ongoing debate about the role of the tall building in our cities, their potential impacts, and experiences of those who use and inhabit them. The conclusions outline how cities should approach the strategic planning of tall buildings, as well as how they should deal with the consequences of individual buildings, particularly on the built heritage.