You could fit every job in Silicon Valley, in those countless sprawling suburban square miles, into midtown Manhattan.
Why would you want to?
The Form Could Be Reborn: The Future of the Skyscraper
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Re: The Form Could Be Reborn: The Future of the Skyscraper
#12You could fit every job in Silicon Valley, in those countless sprawling suburban square miles, into midtown Manhattan.
Actually not really :-) Total office space in the San Jose and 'South bay' area, which covers about 1/2 of what people think of as Silicon valley (people in Mtn View, Palo Alto, Atherton, and Fremont and Milpitas aren't 'south bay' but are often lumped into the Silicon Valley pile. Is over 109M square feet[1], the 'sprawling suburban square miles' add an additional 50M square feet. Midtown Manhattan was at 143M square feet in in 2013 [2], but I'll grant you its surprisingly similar.
What tall buildings give you of course is easier mass transit since you get better economies making a few stations which can serve a million, rather than a lot of stations that serve only thousands.
[1] Total office inventory in the South Bay/San Jose market area amounted to 106,215,509 square feet in 4,417 buildings as of the end of the second quarter 2009. -- Pg 12, https://www.sanjoseca.gov/DocumentCenter/View/1623
[2] 142,809,572 (table 1) -- http://www.thesquarefoot.com/blog/posts/manhattan-q3-2013-of...
Re: The Form Could Be Reborn: The Future of the Skyscraper
#13Really nice to have architects talking about this key piece of infrastructure. My wished-for future of the skyscraper:
- main street social conditions that can exist at the 10th...nth floor, ideally connecting buildings together
- trees, gardens, connections to nature
- fostering more flexible construction of office and housing space
- allowing for new forms of mass transport and automated delivery
Re: The Form Could Be Reborn: The Future of the Skyscraper
#14You could fit every job in Silicon Valley, in those countless sprawling suburban square miles, into midtown Manhattan.
Actually not really :-) Total office space in the San Jose and 'South bay' area, which covers about 1/2 of what people think of as Silicon valley (people in Mtn View, Palo Alto, Atherton, and Fremont and Milpitas aren't 'south bay' but are often lumped into the Silicon Valley pile. Is over 109M square feet[1], the 'sprawling suburban square miles' add an additional 50M square feet. Midtown Manhattan was at 143M squar…
Along with that there is an added efficiency to in person meetings, if everyone works within a mile of one another.
Re: The Form Could Be Reborn: The Future of the Skyscraper
#15One of the basic arguments of this piece is that skyscrapers have a lower environmental impact than low and mid rise buildings, but that's not necessarily true.
The city of Seattle released an updated report for 2013 data on their mandated city wide energy benchmarking. http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/OSE/EBR-2013-re... I would suggest that these results may not translate well to the rest of the world, Seattle's climate is so mild it's a bit of an outlier.
Based on the data collected, mid-rise housing has a lower Energy Use intensity (EUI) than high rise housing, see page 33. Figure 22 on page 51 is also interesting because it looks like the high rise multifamily also has a lower variance than the mid-family. To me that implies there is less room for design improvement, more of the buildings are grouped around the median higher EUI. EUI is the annual energy use per area of building, typically kBtu per square foot in the states.
I found these results somewhat counter-intuitive from an Mechanical/Energy Engineer point of view until I thought about it a bit. Ideally a tall dense building has less exterior area per interior area and hence lower heat loss/gain, but in reality skyscrapers tend to have substantially more glazing(windows) than mid rise and the energy load impact of windows is substantially greater than opaque walls, say R-5 to R-20.
Also, a high rise provides the opportunity for sophisticated mechanical systems with energy recovery and efficient systems, but in reality sophisticated systems are complicated, often poorly implemented and difficult to maintain leading to excessive energy consumption.
Everything can always be designed better in the future, but I would suggest the data doesn't necessarily support that the density skyscrapers bring improves their environmental impact. Granted I'm not taking into account any of the external factors like reduced commutes, transit density, infrastructure density, etc.
Re: The Form Could Be Reborn: The Future of the Skyscraper
#16> We all know how Facebook has disrupted what now seem like quaint forms of friendship, [...], information, [...] No, it really, really , has not. > But more than that, Facebook, along with all the start-up successes of Silicon Valley, has also disrupted paradigms of success and power. Huh, seriously? Who makes this stuff up?! Maybe the author should get out of SV every once in a while to see that in the rest of the…
How has facebook not changed the nature of friendship?
Are you saying that the nature of friendship some sort of absolute that is unaffected by changes in the structure of peoples' day? Like email, facebook is a new medium for friendship, with a multitude of new methods of communication. For example, the like button is a new way to acknowledge in a highly neutral manner. I "like" the cat picture, I also "like" how someone said that they have cancer. Mechanisms like "like" are fundamentally changing the nature of the relationships established and maintained, and it is having an effect outside of that new medium.
Success and power have also changed. Before twitter and facebook in the late 90s and early 00s, do you think that the centralized mass media or the widespread use of email made people successful or famous in the same way? The brain structures are the same, but the culture has changed along with the environment.
Perhaps she wants us to understand that because the same can be said for architecture. The effect of architecture on daily life is far greater IMO. Modernist and international style buildings completely changed what happened at the street level and wiped out entire societies that existed. Only now are mixed use buildings attempting to restore street-level normalcy, except that it will be different. This is because, like facebook that improves upon email, the medium is different than it was in traditional pre-modernist architecture.