The Relationship Between Skyscrapers and Great Cities

> These areas boast an abundance of mid-rise, open-floor plan, historic buildings that create street-level interaction, where people and ideas can combine and recombine to form new innovations and startup companies.

Historic office buildings are anything but open-floor plan-based. Open-floor plans suck for startups because the square footage is usually immense, which means you can't rent office space cheaply. That's why early stage startups these days end up working in accelerators where they can share space, if they're operating out of commercial space at all. Where startups operate with large open floor plans, it's because they've migrated to cheap areas with lots of supply and low demand, namely vacant industrial areas. But those are becoming scarce within cities.

The image of startups in open floor plans is really an artifact of necessity, with rationalizations after-the-fact for why they might be better. And in any event, anybody who has worked in the 1970s and 1980s era single-story office buildings in Silicon Valley knows that the layouts were typically neither totally open nor closed, but had spaces with varying qualities.

I have a small (2-3 person max) private office in an historic building in San Francisco's Financial District. Since the building was constructed in 1890, it's been principally occupied by professionals--doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, etc--who don't typically have many employees, if any. Over the past 5 years I've increasingly seen more tech startups here and it's really ideal for them because they can rent just enough space for what they need. And while the building management has leased a few floors in their entirety to some businesses (a securities trading firm, a game company, a law firm), they seem committed to keeping most of their space in a more traditional[1] layout.

And I'm really thankful for that commitment because I hate open-floor layouts. I like having my own, truly private space that isn't subleased from a larger office. These types of buildings are a rarity. I don't have to walk past any other desk (other than the security desk downstairs) coming to or leaving from my office. I don't have to worry about questions about why I come at noon one day and don't leave until noon the next day (all-night hacking session), nobody knows if I'm taking a nap, doing my taxes, etc. Not that I'd be offended by such questions, it's just that real privacy makes for a much less stressful and more productive environment for me, and I imagine many other people. At the same time, I really benefit from my work space and home space being separate.

[1] Very traditional, I should say, given that large open floor plans started in the 1950s. One of the earliest modernist skyscrapers in the now archetypal International Style--open floors, glass curtain walls, highly segregated service areas--the Crown Zellerbach Building, is one block from here, built in 1959. It's just a completely different architectural style internally. Night & day.

Because implicit (or literally explicit, as in the article) in the notion of dense commercial space is the idea of diversity, where lots of different people can mingle and share ideas. When discussing street-level retail space the notion of having diversity in leasable floor area is well understood and accepted. If every retail space is 10,000 square feet you'll only get large chains. To get the small shops you need small spaces, down to just a couple hundred square feet and less.

But somehow we forget this lesson when it comes to leasable office space. If office space is only leased per floor, you're severely restricting the viability of smaller businesses and professionals in those spaces. Instead, you'll end up pushing all of them outside the core business district. Overtime you'll just end up with a smaller number of medium and large corporations from a small number of industries who are capable of leasing the large spaces.

If you want economic diversity downtown, you need diversity in leasable office space. Short-term that means less optimal use of office space. But long-term it means less volatility and more vibrancy.

Silicon Valley has a ton of single-story office complexes. What's really unique about those complexes, in addition to the sheer number, is that many of the leasable spaces are rather small. Not small enough for single early stage startups or professionals, but definitely small by comparison to what's typical of office architecture today. Given the premium price of office space in dense urban cores, if you want to reproduce in dense cities what Silicon Valley nurtured early, those cities will need smaller office spaces. Especially once the stock market crashes in the next year or so, and VC money becomes tighter.

It's surprising to see Boston this high on the list despite the insurmountable limits it faces building upward:

1) The Logan height restriction that much of downtown faces due to the airport's proximity:

https://www.massport.com/media/11778/BOS_COMPOSITE_Ver2pt0_d...

2) The city's most desirable neighborhoods (Back Bay, Beacon Hill, South End, Charlestown Navy Yard) are protected as historical districts:

http://boston.maps.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap...

3) The overall NIMBY attitude toward new development (surmountable yet heavily suppressed by nearly 400 years of it):

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/04/23/boston-storied-...

That said, there are somehow 5 in the pipeline at 600+ feet:

http://boston.curbed.com/maps/boston-tallest-buildings

I know this is focusing on details, but there is no Ann Arbor, WI. The article copied over the typo from the study. Confusing.

I wish the study explained why they chose the 12 cities they did.

Also their populations do not match the census like they say they do, I am left to question any validity this study has.

They also claim the Empire State building is the tallest in NYC, which hasn't been true since 2012, when One World Trade surpassed it.