Brian Potter, of Construction Physics, recently tried to determine which cities build skyscrapers the fastest. Here’s how he went about that: Here are the results: And here’s one thing he had to say about them: Interestingly enough, the huge outlier in slow construction isn’t the… Read More
This might seem like a fairly benign tweet by Clive Doucet, a former Ottawa City Councillor. I mean, Paris is wonderful. It is livable, walkable, and my favorite city in the world after Toronto. But as I have argued many times before on the blog,… Read More
It was explained to me this week that Paris has two principal towers: The Eiffel Tower and the awful tower. The awful tower is, of course, the Tour Montparnasse. Completed in 1973, the Tour Montparnasse is tall, brown, monolithic, and seemingly out of place with… Read More
The OMA-designed Greenpoint Landing Towers in northern Brooklyn recently topped out. Photos and announcement over here. If you aren’t familiar with the project, it’s very OMA. What I mean by that is that there’s a kind of simple rationality to it. (I just made up… Read More
The Urban Land Institute Toronto is hosting an event and panel discussion on April 8, 2021 about the future of high-rises in our cities. Here’s the blurb: Against the backdrop of the pandemic and its toll, what is the future of high-rises in our cities?… Read More
This Planetizen article (2014) by Brent Toderian surfaced over the weekend. It is about tall buildings and why we should be focused more on how they are designed, as opposed to just how tall they are. Brent talks about this in terms of “density done… Read More
The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) recently published their annual study looking at all of the 200+ meter tall buildings completed over the last year. 143 were completed around the world. The all-time record was 147, which was in 2017. Last year,… Read More
This morning I came across this drone photo of Hong Kong by @vnthota: I immediately thought it was a good example of the typical Hong Kong tower plan that I have been writing about on this blog. You can see the cruciform plan, the light/air cutouts,… Read More
One question that was nagging me after seeing Hong Kong’s “typical” tower typology was: what’s with the cruciform tower plan and all these notches and cutouts? Wouldn’t it be far more efficient to square off the floor plates? I figured that it had to be in… Read More
One of the pedestrian overpasses in Central has an exhibition running right now called Density 2.0. Here is a photo of one of the posters talking about Hong Kong’s typical “8-units-per-floor” tower plan. Noteworthy is the fact that the floor plates contemplate minimal tower separation… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 