Yesterday morning I attended a CTBUH (Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat) breakfast event called The Story of Marketing Tall Buildings.
It consisted of a talk by William Murray, who is Group Director of the UK-based creative agency Wordsearch, and then a panel discussion with some of Toronto’s leading developers. (David Wex of Urban Capital was one of the panelists. Many of you will probably remember him from this BARED post.)
Shown above is one of William’s slides. The title is: The roots of the tree. And I thought it was a great metaphor for what tall buildings, well really all buildings, should aspire to do.
The tendency is to think of buildings as objects. Here, look at how beautiful this thing is. That’s obviously important, but what about its roots? What about the way in which it interfaces with its context and hopefully gives back? Is it a catalyst for positive change?
I thought it was a good slide.
The Guardian recently published an article on vanity height in skyscrapers. What this is referring to is the unoccupied portions of tall buildings which are built purely for vanity reasons – that is, to increase the face height of the building and claim some superlative title.
Example:
The tallest building in the world is currently the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It’s 828m tall. To put that into perspective, the CN Tower in Toronto is 553m. But according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, 29% of the Burj Khalifa’s height is actually unoccupied or “vanity space.” In other buildings, such as the Burj al Arab (also in Dubai), the amount of unusable space is as high as 39%.
For the purists out there, this of course raises the question of what should should be counted when assessing building height. Should it only be spaces where humans typically inhabit? The CN Tower has a lot of unoccupied space, which is why it is frequently excluded from these sorts of ego rankings.
But semantics aside, this is obviously not a new phenomenon and it’s interesting to think about this race to the sky as a proxy for what’s going on in the world. Below is a chart showing which regions have been able to lay claim to the “tallest building of the year” since 1900.
Since 1990, it has been all about Asia and Oceania and China and Taiwan…
The following diagrams were taken from LSE’s Urban Age website. I’ve sorted them from lowest to highest peak residential population density. In each case I’ve also included the year of the dataset.
It’s amazing how much these simple extrusion diagrams can tell you about the city. It also shows you that high population densities don’t necessarily need to equate to tall buildings. Barcelona, in particular, stands out for me.
Berlin (Peak residential density: 21,700 people/km2, 2009)
Stockholm (Peak residential density: 24,900 people/km2, 2012)
London (Peak residential density: 27,100 people/km2, 2013)
São Paulo (Peak residential density: 29,380 people/km2, 2009)
Mexico City (Peak residential density: 48,300 people/km2, 2009)
Barcelona (Peak residential density: 56,800 people/km2, 2013)
New York (Peak residential density: 59,150 people/km2, 2012)
Shanghai (Peak residential density: 74,370 people/km2, 2011)
Istanbul (Peak residential density: 77,300 people/km2, 2013)
Hong Kong (Peak residential density: 111,100 people/km2, 2013)
Mumbai (Peak residential density: 121,300 people/km2, 2013)
Yesterday morning I attended a CTBUH (Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat) breakfast event called The Story of Marketing Tall Buildings.
It consisted of a talk by William Murray, who is Group Director of the UK-based creative agency Wordsearch, and then a panel discussion with some of Toronto’s leading developers. (David Wex of Urban Capital was one of the panelists. Many of you will probably remember him from this BARED post.)
Shown above is one of William’s slides. The title is: The roots of the tree. And I thought it was a great metaphor for what tall buildings, well really all buildings, should aspire to do.
The tendency is to think of buildings as objects. Here, look at how beautiful this thing is. That’s obviously important, but what about its roots? What about the way in which it interfaces with its context and hopefully gives back? Is it a catalyst for positive change?
I thought it was a good slide.
The Guardian recently published an article on vanity height in skyscrapers. What this is referring to is the unoccupied portions of tall buildings which are built purely for vanity reasons – that is, to increase the face height of the building and claim some superlative title.
Example:
The tallest building in the world is currently the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It’s 828m tall. To put that into perspective, the CN Tower in Toronto is 553m. But according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, 29% of the Burj Khalifa’s height is actually unoccupied or “vanity space.” In other buildings, such as the Burj al Arab (also in Dubai), the amount of unusable space is as high as 39%.
For the purists out there, this of course raises the question of what should should be counted when assessing building height. Should it only be spaces where humans typically inhabit? The CN Tower has a lot of unoccupied space, which is why it is frequently excluded from these sorts of ego rankings.
But semantics aside, this is obviously not a new phenomenon and it’s interesting to think about this race to the sky as a proxy for what’s going on in the world. Below is a chart showing which regions have been able to lay claim to the “tallest building of the year” since 1900.
Since 1990, it has been all about Asia and Oceania and China and Taiwan…
The following diagrams were taken from LSE’s Urban Age website. I’ve sorted them from lowest to highest peak residential population density. In each case I’ve also included the year of the dataset.
It’s amazing how much these simple extrusion diagrams can tell you about the city. It also shows you that high population densities don’t necessarily need to equate to tall buildings. Barcelona, in particular, stands out for me.
Berlin (Peak residential density: 21,700 people/km2, 2009)
Stockholm (Peak residential density: 24,900 people/km2, 2012)
London (Peak residential density: 27,100 people/km2, 2013)
São Paulo (Peak residential density: 29,380 people/km2, 2009)
Mexico City (Peak residential density: 48,300 people/km2, 2009)
Barcelona (Peak residential density: 56,800 people/km2, 2013)
New York (Peak residential density: 59,150 people/km2, 2012)
Shanghai (Peak residential density: 74,370 people/km2, 2011)
Istanbul (Peak residential density: 77,300 people/km2, 2013)
Hong Kong (Peak residential density: 111,100 people/km2, 2013)
Mumbai (Peak residential density: 121,300 people/km2, 2013)
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog