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
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… Read More
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… Read More
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… Read More
When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Toronto, I never played in the backyard. I played in the streets. That’s where all the kids came together. We would play baseball in somebody’s driveway, using one of the garage door “squares” as… Read More
Tall buildings will sway in the wind. And when they get taller and skinnier, the swaying becomes more pronounced. In seismically active cities, such as Tokyo and Taipei, “tuned mass dampeners” are often used near the top of tall buildings to offset the swaying caused… Read More
