I get conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand it's highly unlikely anyone in that tower would get a shred of empathy from the common man (and highly unlikely this is even one of their 5 other homes), but on the other it's just a damn shame that some of the most prominent landmarks in the greatest city in the world are crappy places to live at. I'm not of the opinion they're eyesores - the nyc Skyline was stag…
Also see the Millennium Tower in San Francisco which is sinking and leaning. They built it on unstable ground without a sufficiently deep foundation.
> Initial findings showed that 73 percent of mechanical, electrical and plumbing components observed failed to conform with the developers’ drawings How is that even legal? Let alone technically possible? How does construction of these monsters work? "Yo, Bert, I need some 5x5 high-elastic steel framing for the 72th floor!" "Sorry man, we ran out of that when we 'redesigned' the elevator shaft, how about you take thi…
I am doing a restoration of an old palace in Poland, the biggest issue is often the contractors do not understand the architect’s drawings. The drawings are more for the regulators such as building control than actually for the people working on site. Talking to the constructors it is normal for architects to specify the impossible, leaving it to the constructor to actually make it up on the job. Somebody said to me…
They cut down waste a lot when it comes to manufactured home,s pre-built walls, etc..
> The enormous costs to build super talls would go much further in myriad other ways, even just by making a few tall or many regular size buildings. Note that these supertalls only exist in the first place because it's artificially difficult to build regular-sized buildings in Manhattan. It's very unlikely anybody would have bothered building anything in this specific form if not for the onerous zoning codes the deve…
I'm not sure that article supports your conclusion. They made oversized mechanical floors to evade height limits. They could have made normal sized floors and still complied with zoning regulations. If the zoning regulations had permitted denser buildings, it would still be just as tall, but with more interior floors. Making the building ultra tall was the point, not an accidental quirk of zoning.
Yes, of course they wanted the building to be tall. The claim is that it wouldn't be super-tall, skinny, and with so much empty space, if not for the particulars of NYC zoning law. If they were allowed to make a normally-proportioned building on an entire lot, then they most likely would have done that. But they aren't.
I am doing a restoration of an old palace in Poland, the biggest issue is often the contractors do not understand the architect’s drawings. The drawings are more for the regulators such as building control than actually for the people working on site. Talking to the constructors it is normal for architects to specify the impossible, leaving it to the constructor to actually make it up on the job. Somebody said to me…
> Talking to the constructors it is normal for architects to specify the impossible If the drawings are indeed for regulators, then architects should be sued when they prove to be impossible impossible. Failing that, we should get rid of architects to begin with (if they draw impossible things, what good are they?), and have actual engineers draw something that can actually be built. (Of course, the engineer should r…
Calling someone an ‘engineer’ doesn’t make them magically a more practical person. I’ve been on the contractor’s side in arguments with structural engineers where they’ve designed details that were literally impossible to weld.
I wonder if the old guard of mega skyscrapers like the Empire State or Chrysler suffered from these problems too, or it's just inherent to the new skinny towers popping up.
Noise is what turns me off from high rise residential buildings. When you watch the construction, many don’t event have concrete walls between apartments on the same floor, and I am ready to guess the concrete floors are as thin as required to keep the weight of the structure down. Add to that all-glass external walls, and I only heard stories from friends who live there that you hear everything your neighbours do, p…
I’ve lived in high-rise buildings in Seattle where the walls were effectively soundproof. Your neighbors could be as loud as they wanted to be and you never heard them. It took some heavy crashes on the floors above for you to hear the dull thud. Quality of construction matters a lot. Making apartment buildings highly insulated sound-wise is old science, not magic.
Soundproofing eats a lot into square metres. It's one of the biggest luxury in highrises.
I don't understand how anyone would want to live in a high rise. Rational or not, if feels dangerous to live high up in a narrow bottlenecked artificial construct.
I completely agree. The very old buildings in Montreal are soundproof. But the new “optimized” condos coming up have thin concrete floors(the bare minimum code) and the common walls are also soundproofed to the bare minimum code I think STC 50 if I remember.
Concrete floors with multiple thin layers of foam embedded in the concrete end up stronger and lighter than concrete without foam, and are way better at sound insulation. The downside is it's logistically harder to arrange everything in the mould. When someone figures out a process to do it without so much labor, it'll become standard practice, because it'll save concrete and weight.
Won't the foam deteriorate over time, possibly faster than the concrete ?
for once, a subsection of rich people get a taste of what most regular people go through on a daily basis just goes to show that this project might have spent more money on marketing and advertising rather than on their engineering and architect departments.
They won't get a taste though. These people are rich enough that at the first sign of a leak in their apartment they'll have people to book them into a luxury hotel before flying off to another apartment, or maybe a little holiday to help them get over the stress they've had to 'endure'.
I console myself with the notion:
Rich people are often unhappy because they have a very high 'drive'.
It is the dissatisfaction with what we have that makes us unhappy. Dopamine has a lot to answer for, because if you're high in dopamine you are constantly searching without ever succeeding.
So the very thing that makes successful people successful also tends to make them unhappy.
The state of searching is a state of dissatisfaction. You have to stop searching in order to be content.