Dictionary:
sky·scrap·er (skī'skrā'pər) ![]() |
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Sidebar: The Empire State Building was intended to end the competition for tallest building. It was to tower 102 stories, 1,250 ft (381 m) above Manhattan's streets. Its developers, John J. Raskob and Pierre Samuel Du Pont, along with former New York Governor Alfred E. Smith, announced in August 1929 their intention to build the world's tallest building. They chose the construction firm Starrett Brothers and Eken, and the architectural firm Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon for the project with William F. Lamb as the chief designer. If is set back from the street above the fifth floor and then soars uninterrupted for more than 1,000 ft (305 m) to the 86th floor. The exterior is limestone and granite and vertical chrome-nickel-steel alloy columns extend from the sixth floor to the top. The building contained 67 elevators and 6,500 glass windows, topped with a 200-ft (61-m) mooring mast for dirigibles. The Empire State Building was completed on April 11, 1931, 12 days ahead of schedule and officially opened on May 1, 1931. The building took its place in history as the tallest building ever built, holding this title for more than 40 years. It was not until 1972, when the 1,348-ft-(411-m-) tall twin towers of the World Trade Center were completed that the Empire State Building was surpassed in height. The World Trade Center in turn was surpassed in 1974 by the Sears Tower in Chicago, which at 1,453 ft (443 mj became the tallest building in the world. |
Background
There is no precise definition of how many stories or what height makes a building a skyscraper. "I don't think it is how many floors you have. I think it is attitude," architect T. J. Gottesdiener told the Christian Science Monitor. Gottesdiener, a partner in the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, designers of numerous tall buildings including the Sears Tower in Chicago, Illinois, continued, "What is a skyscraper? It is anything that makes you stop, stand, crane your neck back, and look up."
Some observers apply the word "skyscraper" to buildings of at least 20 stories. Others reserve the term for structures of at least 50 stories. But it is widely accepted that a skyscraper fits buildings with 100 or more stories. At 102 stories, the Empire State Building's in New York occupied height reaches 1,224 ft (373 m), and its spire, which is the tapered portion atop a building's roof, rises another 230 ft (70 m). Only 25 buildings around the world stand taller than 1,000 ft (300 m), counting their spires, but not antennas rising above them.
The tallest freestanding structure in the world is the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada, which rises to a height of 1,815 ft (553 m); constructed to support a television antenna, the tower is not designed for human occupation, except for a restaurant and observation deck perched at 1,100 ft (335 m). The world's tallest occupied structure is the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which reach a height of 1,483 ft (452 m), including spires. The Sears Tower in Chicago boasts the highest occupied level; the roof of its 110th story stands at 1,453 ft (443 m).
In some ways, super-tall buildings are not practical. It is cheaper to build two half-height buildings than one very tall one. Developers must find tenants for huge amounts of space at one location; for example, the Sears Tower encloses 4.5 million square feet (415,000 square meters). On the other hand, developers in crowded cities must make the fullest possible use of limited amounts of available land. Nonetheless, the decision to build a dramatically tall building is usually based not on economics, but on the desire to attract attention and gain prestige.
History
Several technological advances occurred in the late nineteenth century that combined to make skyscraper design and construction possible. Among them were the ability to mass produce steel, the invention of safe and efficient elevators, and the development of improved techniques for measuring and analyzing structural loads and stresses. During the 1920s and 1930s, skyscraper development was further spurred by invention of electric arc welding and fluorescent light bulbs (their bright light allowed people to work farther from windows and generated less heat than incandescent bulbs).
Traditionally, the walls of a building supported the structure; the taller the structure, the thicker the walls had to be. A 16-story building constructed in Chicago in 1891 had walls 6 ft (1.8 m) thick at the base. The need for very thick walls was eliminated with the invention of steel-frame construction, in which a rigid steel skeleton supports the building's weight, and the outer walls are merely hung from the frame almost like curtains. The first building to use this design was the 10-story Home Insurance Company Building, which was constructed in Chicago in 1885.
The 792-ft (242-m) tall Woolworth Building, erected in New York City in 1913, first combined all of the components of a true skyscraper. Its steel skeleton rose from a foundation supported on concrete pillars that extended down to bedrock (a layer of solid rock strong enough to support the building), its frame was braced to resist expected wind forces, and its high-speed elevators provided both local and express service to its 60 floors.
In 1931, the Empire State Building rose in New York City like a 1,250-ft (381-m) exclamation point. It would remain the world's tallest office building for 41 years. By 2000, only six other buildings in the world would surpass its height.
Raw Materials
Reinforced concrete is one important component of skyscrapers. It consists of concrete (a mixture of water, cement powder, and aggregate consisting of gravel or sand) poured around a gridwork of steel rods (called rebar) that will strengthen the dried concrete against bending motion caused by the wind. Concrete is inherently strong under compressive forces; however, the enormous projected weight of the Petronas Towers led designers to specify a new type of concrete that was more than twice as strong as usual. This high-strength material was achieved by adding very fine particles to the usual concrete ingredients; the increased surface area of these tiny particles produced a stronger bond.
The other primary raw material for skyscraper construction is steel, which is an alloy of iron and carbon. Nearby buildings often limit the amount of space available for construction activity and supply storage, so steel beams of specified sizes and shapes are delivered to the site just as they are needed for placement. Before delivery, the beams are coated with a mixture of plaster and vermiculite (mica that has been heat-expanded to form sponge-like particles) to protect them from corrosion and heat. After each beam is welded into place, the fresh joints are sprayed with the same coating material. An additional layer of insulation, such as fiberglass batting covered with aluminum foil, may then be wrapped around the beams.
To maximize the best qualities of concrete and steel, they are often used together in skyscraper construction. For example, a support column may be formed by pouring concrete around a steel beam.
A variety of materials are used to cover the skyscraper's frame. Known as "cladding," the sheets that form the exterior walls may consist of glass, metals, such as aluminum or stainless steel, or masonry materials, such as granite, marble, or limestone.
Design
Design engineers translate the architect's vision of the building into a detailed plan that will be structurally sound and possible to construct.
Designing a low-rise building involves creating a structure that will support its own weight (called the dead load) and the weight of the people and furniture that it will contain (the live load). For a skyscraper, the sideways force of wind affects the structure more than the weight of the building and its contents. The designer must ensure that the building will not be toppled by a strong wind, and also that it will not sway enough to cause the occupants physical or emotional discomfort.
Each skyscraper design is unique. Major structural elements that may be used alone or in combination include a steel skeleton hidden behind non-load-bearing curtain walls, a reinforced concrete skeleton that is in-filled with cladding panels to form the exterior walls, a central concrete core (open column) large enough to contain elevator shafts and other mechanical components, and an array of support columns around the perimeter of the building that are connected by horizontal beams to one another and to the core.
Because each design is innovative, models of proposed super tall buildings are tested in wind tunnels to determine the effect of high wind on them, and also the effect on surrounding buildings of wind patterns caused by the new building. If tests show the building will sway excessively in strong winds, designers may add mechanical devices that counteract or restrict motion.
In addition to the superstructure, designers must also plan appropriate mechanical systems such as elevators that move people quickly and comfortably, air circulation systems, and plumbing.
The Construction Process
Each skyscraper is a unique structure designed to conform to physical constraints imposed by factors like geology and climate, meet the needs of the tenants, and satisfy the aesthetic objectives of the owner and the architect. The construction process for each building is also unique. The following steps give a general idea of the most common construction techniques.
The substructure
The superstructure and core
Once construction of a skyscraper is underway, work on several phases of the structure proceeds simultaneously. For example, by the time the support columns are several stories high, workers begin building floors for the lower stories. As the columns reach higher, the flooring crews move to higher stories, as well, and finishing crews begin working on the lowest levels. Overlapping these phases not only makes the most efficient use of time, but it also ensures that the structure remains stable during construction.
The exterior
Finishing
Quality Control
Various factors are taken into consideration when assuring quality control. Because of the huge scale of skyscrapers, a small positioning error at the base will be magnified when extended to the roof. In addition to normal surveying instruments, unusual devices like global positioning system (GPS) sensors and aircraft bombsights may be used to verify the placement and alignment of structural members.
Soil sensors around the building site are used to detect any unexpected earth movement caused by the construction activity.
Byproducts/Waste
Excavation of the foundation pit and basement levels require the removal of enormous amounts of dirt. When the 110-story World Trade Center towers were built in New York in the early 1970s, more than I million cubic yards (765,000 cubic meters) of soil and rock were removed and dumped in the Hudson River to create 23.5 acres (95,100 square meters) of new land, on which another skyscraper was later constructed.
The Future
Plans have been developed for several new skyscrapers that would break existing height records. For example, a 108-story building at 7 South Dearborn Street in Chicago, expected to be completed by 2004, will be 1,550 ft (473 m) tall. It will provide 43 acres (174,000 square meters) of enclosed space on a lot only 200 ft (61 m) square.
In 1956, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright announced plans for a mile-high (1.6-km tall) skyscraper in which 100,000 people could work. In 1991, another American architect, Dr. Eugene Tsui, designed a 2-mile (3,220-m) tall building that would provide space for living, working, and recreation for 1,000,000 people. Although such buildings may be theoretically constructable, they are currently impractical. For example, human comfort levels limit elevator speeds to no more than 3,000 ft/min (915 m/min). To accommodate the 100,000 people working in Wright's proposed structure, the number of elevator shafts would have taken up too large a portion of the building's area.
Improvements in elevator technology will be important for future skyscraper designs. Self-propelled, cableless elevator cars that move horizontally, as well as vertically, have been proposed, but are still under development. Computerized car dispatching systems using fuzzy logic could be refined to carry people more efficiently by grouping passengers whose destinations are near each other.
Where to Learn More
Books
Books Dunn, Andrew. Structures: Skyscrapers. New York: Thomson Learning, 1993.
Michael, Duncan. How Skyscrapers Are Made. New York: Facts on File Publications, 1987.
Periodicals
Hayashi, Alden M. "The Sky's the Limit." Scientific American Presents: Extreme Engineering (Winter 1999): 66 ff.
Richey, Warren. "New Rush of Buildings Reaching for the Clouds." The Christian Science Monitor (July 8, 1998): 1.
Other
Dankwa, E. T. New York Skyscrapers.http://mx3.xoom.com/iNetwork/NYC (March 2000).
"Ultima's Tower, Two-Mile High Sky City." Tsui Design & Research.http://www.tdrinc.com/ultima.html (March 2000).
[Article by: Loretta Hall]
| Word Origin: skyscraper |
Before it became a building, Americans knew skyscraper as "a high-flying bird" (1840), "a tall hat or bonnet" (1847), or "a high fly ball in baseball" (1866). But in 1883, a visionary writer in American Architect and Building News declared that "a public building should always have something towering up above all in its neighborhood.... This form of sky-scraper gives that peculiar refined, independent, self-contained, daring, bold, heaven-reaching, erratic, piratic, Quixotic, American thought ('young America with his lack of veneration'). The capitol building should always have a dome. I should raise thereon a gigantic 'sky-scraper,' contrary to all precedent in practice, and I should trust to American constructive and engineering skill to build it strong enough for any gale." We have built skyscrapers ever since.
In early America, the steeples of the churches reached closest to the heavens. In the mid-nineteenth century, the state capitols raised themselves ever higher. Even county courthouses attained new heights. But by the end of the century, both church and state stood in the shade of the commercial skyscraper.
And for commercial developers it was not enough to take conventional construction to its upper limit, ten or eleven stories with thick load-bearing walls. American "constructive and engineering skill" enabled us to reach higher. We used iron to reinforce the masonry walls, then to support the floors, then to support both floors and walls. Finally we scrapped the iron entirely and replaced it with a riveted steel skeleton, and buildings were at last free to rise to any height.
In the 1890s, fifteen stories was high for a skyscraper, but the twentieth century soared much higher. In 1913, the Woolworth Building in New York City reached sixty stories. That was overshadowed by New York's Empire State Building in 1931, at 102 stories, which in turn yielded in 1974 to Chicago's Sears Tower, at 110 stories--1454 feet tall.
| Architecture: skyscraper |
A very tall, multistoried building, usually having curtain walls, 1 so that the exterior walls are non-load-bearing, being supported independently at each floor by its skeleton-frame construction; also see steel-frame construction and tripartite scheme.
| US History Encyclopedia: Skyscrapers |
Skyscrapers entered American parlance around 1890, describing ten-to fifteen-story commercial buildings mostly in Chicago and New York. Dependent on the passenger elevator, telephone, and incandescent bulb for internal circulation, communication, and illumination, the structural potential of its steel frame ensured that the economic benefit of multiplying lot size twenty, fifty, or one hundred times would render municipal height restrictions obsolete. Well before New York's 1913 Woolworth Building opened at 792 feet (54 stories), the world's tallest edifice excepting the Eiffel Tower in Paris, it was a social convention to wonder if the only limit to upward growth were the heavens themselves.
Artistic hesitation characterized skyscraper design from the beginning, less so in Chicago than in New York. Although skyscrapers' determining features were steel and height, architects were inclined to hide steel inside highly decorated, thick masonry walls. In addition, they negated height by wrapping every few stories with a protruding cornice interrupting vertical flow or by periodically shifting styles, so, as a building ascended, it resembled a stack of small structures. Those willing to embrace height tended to base form on historical analogies, usually French gothic cathedrals or Italian medieval towers.
In Chicago, Louis Sullivan referred to the classical column, but in his pioneering search for a self-referential skyscraper aesthetic, he transformed base, shaft, and capital into commercial ground floor, office tier, and attic for ancillary services, each function indicated externally. By recessing windows and walls a few inches behind columns and mullions, he privileged vertical elements of the frame to create, he wrote in 1896, "a proud and soaring thing" that was "every inch of it tall." Although highly regarded by critics, Sullivan's "system of vertical construction" was not widely adopted by architects, not even his Chicago School (c. 1885–1915) colleagues, whose so-called "utilitarian" building facades, less ornamented and more fenestrated than Sullivan's, closely followed in composition the grid pattern of the frame, which in reality is nondirectional.
Chicago School buildings were America's principal contribution to the formative stages of what was soon labeled "modern architecture." The implication, which might be encapsulated in the phrase "form follows structure," was disregarded in the United States during the 1920s, but it was taken up in Europe, particularly in Germany, where in 1921 and 1922 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe proposed free-form skyscrapers entirely encased with glass panels clipped to the edges of floor slabs. Of the 265 entries from 23 countries to the 1922 Chicago Tribune headquarters competition, 37 were German, notable among them Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer's grid of reinforced concrete completely filled with windows. These and other European designs conclusively demonstrated what Chicagoans had almost perceived. Since load-bearing walls were structurally unnecessary, a skyscraper's facade could be reduced to little more than frame and glazing. The lesson was ignored when the Tribune Company selected Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells's decidedly unglassy, neogothic cousin to the Woolworth Building.
Until large-scale private sector construction halted during the Great Depression, American skyscrapers were either historical pastiches or tips of the hat to European art deco. Most famous were New York's Chrysler, Empire State, and Rockefeller Center buildings (of 1930 and 1931), featuring diagonal or zigzag "jazz age" ornament and equal amounts of glass and masonry in alternating vertical or horizontal strips forming crisp, rectilinear facades that nonetheless hide the frame. Two exceptions were noteworthy: Hood's 1929–1931 McGraw-Hill Building, designed with André Fouilhoux, in New York; and William Lescaze's 1929–1932 Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building, designed with George Howe. Both were in what was labeled "the international style," which made structurally determined form something of a fetish.
It was fitting that the European émigrés Fouilhoux (from Paris) and Lescaze (from Zurich) figured prominently in the reconfiguration of American skyscrapers, because a third European, Mies van der Rohe, who arrived in Chicago in 1938, almost single-handedly completed the process, beginning with his 1946–1949 Promontory Apartments. More than any other edifice, his 1954–1958 Seagram Building in New York made the flatroofed, glass-walled, steel-or concrete-framed, minimally ornamented box a corporate signature as well as an indication that derivations of European modernism had captured the mainstream of American architecture.
A comparison of the two McGraw-Hill Buildings in New York suggests how much had changed since 1929. The first, by Hood with Fouilhoux, is bluish-green glazed terra-cotta and steps back five times before reaching its penthouse, which is sided with huge firm-name graphics. Its thirty-five richly textured, horizontally articulated stories complement the vertical thrust of the elevator shafts and stairwell. Although resolutely international in style, it resembles no other building. The four identical facades of the second McGraw-Hill Building, built in 1973 by Harrison, Abramovitz, and Harris, soar without interruption or variation through forty-five stories of closely spaced reddish granite columns. Devoid of graphics, it is a clone of the flanking Celanese and Exxon Buildings by the same architects. In less than half a century, collective anonymity replaced architectural individuality in every American city.
The low profile adopted by American corporations after World War II gave way in the 1980s to a more assertive public posture expressed architecturally in post-modernism (POMO): the return of polychrome, ornament, and historical reference enlivened by mixtures of nonorthogonal with rectilinear geometries. Rejecting the Mies-inspired modernist box and companion frame-based aesthetic, POMO recaptured a spirit of experimentation akin to that of the European 1920s but enhanced by an array of new materials and technologies, including computer-assisted design. The sky was again the limit in terms not of height but of artistic possibility.
Globalization of capital internationalized the profession. For example, four architects were invited in 2000 to submit proposals for a new New York Times headquarters: Norman Foster of London; Renzo Piano with offices in Paris and Genoa; Cesar Pelli, the Argentina-born dean of the Yale School of Art and Architecture; and Frank Gehry, a Toronto native residing in California. Gehry produced a twisting, undulating, concave and convex agglomeration of sinewy, computer-generated, non-Euclidean shapes that appears to be one tower or three, depending on the viewer's vantage point. Like the other submissions, it makes no reference except for signage to site or function, suggesting that any one of the four could be erected anywhere to serve any purpose. Sharing only the absence of similarity, they are as far removed from the modernist box as that was from the Woolworth Building.
During the course of a century, an American commercial building type, stylistically conditioned by historical precedent or by the steel frame, became an omnifunctional symbol of globalization conditioned only by architectural imagination. Technical limits to skyscraper height may be approaching, but form has no limits at all.
Bibliography
Goldberger, Paul. The Skyscraper. New York: Knopf, 1981.
Scuri, Piera. Late-Twentieth-Century Skyscrapers. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990.
Twombly, Robert. Power and Style: A Critique of Twentieth-Century Architecture in the United States. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.
Van Leeuwen, Thomas A. P. The Skyward Trend of Thought: The Metaphysics of the American Skyscraper. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: skyscraper |
Development of the Form
Many mechanical and structural developments in the last quarter of the 19th cent. contributed to its evolution. With the perfection of the high-speed elevator after 1887, skyscrapers were able to attain any desired height. The earliest tall buildings were of solid masonry construction, with the thick walls of the lower stories usurping a disproportionate amount of floor space. In order to permit thinner walls through the entire height of the building, architects began to use cast iron in conjunction with masonry. This was followed by cage construction, in which the iron frame supported the floors and the masonry walls bore their own weight.
The next step was the invention of a system in which the metal framework would support not only the floors but also the walls. This innovation appeared in the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, designed in 1883 by William Le Baron Jenney-the first building to employ steel skeleton construction and embody the general characteristics of a modern skyscraper. The subsequent erection in Chicago of a number of similar buildings made it the center of the early skyscraper architecture. In the 1890s the steel frame was formed into a completely riveted skeleton bearing all the structural loads, with the exterior or thin curtain walls serving merely as an enclosing screen.
Legal and Aesthetic Refinements
In 1892 the New York Building Law made its first provisions for skeleton constructions. There followed a period of experimentation to devise efficient floor plans and aesthetically satisfying forms. In New York City the Flatiron Building by D. H. Burnham was constructed in 1902, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower in 1909, and the Woolworth Building, 60 stories high, by Cass Gilbert, in 1913. The last, with Gothic ornamentation, exemplifies the general tendency at that time to adapt earlier architectural styles to modern construction. The radical innovator Louis Henry Sullivan gave impetus to a new, bold aesthetic for skyscrapers. An excellent example is his design for the Wainwright building in St. Louis (1890-91). Frank Lloyd Wright also contributed his unorthodox vision to such structures as the Price Tower (1953) in Bartlesville, Okla.
In 1916, New York City adopted the Building Zone Resolution, establishing legal control over the height and plan of buildings and over the factors relating to health, fire hazard, and assurance of adequate light and air to buildings and streets. Regulations regarding the setting back of exterior walls above a determined height, largely intended to allow light to reach the streets, gave rise to buildings whose stepped profiles characterize the American skyscraper of subsequent years.
With the complex structural and planning problems solved, architects still seek solutions to the difficulties of integrating skyscrapers with community requirements of hygiene, transportation, and commercial interest. In New York during the 1950s, public plazas were incorporated into the designs of the Lever House by Gordon Bunshaft and the Seagram Building of Mies van der Rohe. These International style buildings are also examples of the effective use of vast expanses of glass in skyscrapers. More recently, numerous skyscrapers have been constructed in a number of postmodern modes.
Outstanding Skyscrapers
The tallest skyscrapers are freestanding structures such as the CN Tower in Toronto (opened 1976), which measures 1,815 ft (553 m), and the Ostankino Tower in Moscow (opened 1967), which is 1,771 ft (540 m) high. By convention, however, a building is defined as being primarily for human habitation with the greatest majority of its height divided into occupiable floors. The height of a building is measured from the sidewalk level of the main entrance to the structural top of the building. This includes spires but does not include television antennas, radio antennas, or flagpoles. By this definition the tallest building is Taipei 101, Taipei, Taiwan, which was topped off at 1,671 ft (509 m) and 101 stories in 2003. The twin Petronas Towers (opened 1997) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, are the second tallest; 88 stories high and topped by twin spires, they stand 1,483 ft (456 m) tall. Third highest is the Sears Tower (opened 1974, now the Willis Tower) in Chicago; its 110 stories rise 1,454 ft (443 m) with an additional 253 ft (77 m) for the television antenna on top, making it the world's third tallest freestanding structure at 1,707 ft (520 m). The next tallest building, the 1,380 ft (420 m) tall Jin Mao Building (opened 1998) in Shanghai, China, is another example of leadership in skyscraper construction shifting from the United States.
Among the highest New York City skyscrapers are the Empire State Building, with 102 stories, 1,250 ft (381 m) high; the Chrysler Building, with 77 stories, 1,048 ft (319 m) high; 60 Wall Tower, with 67 stories, 950 ft (290 m) high; and the GE (formerly RCA) Building in Rockefeller Center, with 70 stories, 850 ft (259 m) high. The former World Trade Center, which was the tallest building in the city until it was destroyed (Sept., 2001) by a terrorist attack, had two unstepped, rectangular towers of 110 stories each, one 1,362 ft (415 m) and the other 1,368 ft (417 m) high.
Bibliography
See K. Sabbagh, Skyscraper: The Making of a Building (repr. 1991); C. Willis, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (1995); P. Johnson and J. Dupre, Skyscrapers (1996); D. Hoffmann, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, and the Skyscraper (1999); S. B. Landau and C. W. Condit, The Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865-1913 (repr. 1999).
| Essay: The skyscraper |
A skyscraper described in a song from the musical Oklahoma as "'Bout as high as a building ought to go" was in Kansas City, Missouri, and it was seven stories high. About the same time as the action in Oklahoma, another Midwestern city, Chicago, Illinois, boasted the earliest buildings recognized as skyscrapers today, which were two or three times as high.
The development of the skyscraper is often viewed as a consequence of the elevator. Elevators did permit buildings as tall as 10 to 16 stories, but lower floors were almost unusable. Concrete walls had to be 6 m (20 ft) thick to support the upper stories. The true key to the skyscraper was the steel frame that supported the walls and floors. Even so, the tallest office building to the end of the 19th century, the Park Row Building in New York City, was only 132 m (435 ft) high, half as tall as the Eiffel Tower, built around the same time. Also, early hydraulic elevators were only effective up to about 20 stories. Modern high-speed cable elevators, when introduced in 1900, greatly facilitated the construction of what we would view today as skyscrapers.
William Le Baron Jenney in Chicago first used a mixture of cast iron and steel to support a tall office building, the Home Insurance Building. Soon he and other Chicago architects were using all-steel frames. What they mounted on the frames, however, was often a tall version of a Classic Revival building. Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect who designed the first spare, modern looking buildings and who is best known today, was not a success during most of his career. His turn-of-the-century buildings that showed clearly the influence of the steel frameworks in vertical and horizontal lines were not acclaimed at the time, and Sullivan died in poverty in 1924 after years with no work. His influence lived on, however, as a result of his teaching.
In the 20th century, the largest number of tall skyscrapers were built in New York City, but Chicago also had its share of famous skyscrapers. Today Chicago still has the tallest building in the United States, the Sears Tower. Today, however, the tallest skyscraper in the world is the Taipei Financial Center in Taiwan, at 508 m (1667 ft); it was completed in 2003.
| Wikipedia: Skyscraper |
A skyscraper is a tall, continuously habitable building. There is no official definition or height above which a building may clearly be classified as a skyscraper. Most cities define the term empirically; even a building of 80 meters (262 feet) may be considered a skyscraper if it protrudes above its built environment and changes the overall skyline.
Contents |
The word "skyscraper" originally was a nautical term referring to a small triangular sail set above the skysail on a sailing ship. The term was first applied to buildings in the late 19th century as a result of public amazement at the tall buildings being built in Chicago and New York City. The traditional definition of a skyscraper began with the "first skyscraper", Chicago's now demolished ten-storey steel-framed Home Insurance Building (1885).
The structural definition of the word skyscraper was refined later by architectural historians, based on engineering developments of the 1880s that had enabled construction of tall multi-storey buildings. This definition was based on the steel skeleton—-as opposed to constructions of load-bearing masonry, which passed their practical limit in 1891 with Chicago's Monadnock Building. Philadelphia's City Hall, completed in 1901, still holds claim as the world's tallest load-bearing masonry structure at 167 m (548 ft). The steel frame developed in stages of increasing self-sufficiency, with several buildings in Chicago and New York advancing the technology that allowed the steel frame to carry a building on its own. Today, however, many of the tallest skyscrapers are built almost entirely with reinforced concrete.[1] Pumps and storage tanks maintain water pressure at the top of skyscrapers.
A loose convention in the United States and Europe now draws the lower limit of a skyscraper at 150 meters (500 ft).[2] A skyscraper taller than 300 meters (984 ft) may be referred to as supertall. Shorter buildings are still sometimes referred to as skyscrapers if they appear to dominate their surroundings.
The somewhat arbitrary term skyscraper should not be confused with the also ill-defined term high-rise. The Emporis Standards Committee defines a high-rise building as "a multi-story structure between 35-100 meters tall, or a building of unknown height from 12-39 floors"[3] and a skyscraper as "a multi-story building whose architectural height is at least 100 meters."[4] Some structural engineers define a highrise as any vertical construction for which wind is a more significant load factor than earthquake or weight. Note that this criterion fits not only high rises but some other tall structures, such as towers.
The word skyscraper often carries a connotation of pride and achievement. The skyscraper, in name and social function, is a modern expression of the age-old symbol of the world center or axis mundi: a pillar that connects earth to heaven and the four compass directions to one another.[5]
Modern skyscrapers are built with materials such as steel, glass, reinforced concrete and granite, and routinely utilize mechanical equipment such as water pumps and elevators. Until the 19th century, buildings of over six stories were rare, as having great numbers of stairs to climb was impractical for inhabitants, and water pressure was usually insufficient to supply running water above 50 m (164 ft).
The tallest building in ancient times was the Great Pyramid of Giza in ancient Egypt, which was 146 metres (480 ft) tall and was built in the 26th century BC. Its height was not surpassed for thousands of years, possibly until the 14th century AD with the construction of Lincoln Cathedral (though its height is disputed),[6] which in turn was not surpassed in height until the Washington Monument in 1884. However, being uninhabited buildings, none of these buildings actually complies with the definition of a skyscraper.
High-rise apartment buildings already flourished in classical antiquity: ancient Roman insulae in Rome and other imperial cities reached up to 10 and more stories,[7] some with more than 200 stairs.[8] Several emperors, beginning with Augustus (r. 30 BC-14 AD), attempted to establish limits of 20-25 m for multi-storey buildings, but met with only limited success.[9][10] The lower floors were typically occupied by either shops or wealthy families, while the upper stories were rented out to the lower classes.[7] Surviving Oxyrhynchus Papyri indicate that seven-storey buildings even existed in provincial towns, such as in 3rd century AD Hermopolis in Roman Egypt.[11]
The skylines of many important medieval cities had large numbers of high-rise urban towers. Wealthy families built these towers for defensive purposes and as status symbols. The residential Towers of Bologna in the 12th century, for example, numbered between 80 to 100 at a time, the largest of which (known as the "Two Towers") rise to 97.2 metres (319 ft). In Florence, a law of 1251 decreed that all urban buildings should be reduced to a height of less than 26 m, the regulation immediately put into effect.[12] Even medium-sized towns at the time such as San Gimignano are known to have featured 72 towers up to 51 m height.[12]
The medieval Egyptian city of Fustat housed many high-rise residential buildings, which Al-Muqaddasi in the 10th century described as resembling minarets. Nasir Khusraw in the early 11th century described some of them rising up to 14 stories, with roof gardens on the top floor complete with ox-drawn water wheels for irrigating them.[13] Cairo in the 16th century had high-rise apartment buildings where the two lower floors were for commercial and storage purposes and the multiple stories above them were rented out to tenants.[14] An early example of a city consisting entirely of high-rise housing is the 16th-century city of Shibam in Yemen. Shibam was made up of over 500 tower houses,[15] each one rising 5 to 11 storeys high,[16] with each floor being an apartment occupied by a single family. The city was built in this way in order to protect it from Bedouin attacks.[15] Shibam still has the tallest mudbrick buildings in the world, with many of them over 100 feet (30 m) high.[17]
An early modern example of high-rise housing was in 17th-century Edinburgh, Scotland, where a defensive city wall defined the boundaries of the city. Due to the restricted land area available for development, the houses increased in height instead. Buildings of 11 stories were common, and there are records of buildings as high as 14 stories. Many of the stone-built structures can still be seen today in the old town of Edinburgh. The oldest iron framed building in the world is The Flaxmill (also locally known as the "Maltings"), in Shrewsbury, England. Built in 1797, it is seen as the "grandfather of skyscrapers”, since its fireproof combination of cast iron columns and cast iron beams developed into the modern steel frame that made modern skyscrapers possible. Unfortunately, it lies derelict and needs much investment to keep it standing.
An early development was Oriel Chambers in Liverpool. Designed by Peter Ellis in 1864, the building was the world's first iron-framed, curtain-walled office building.[18][19] Further developments led to the world's first skyscraper, the ten-storey Home Insurance Building in Chicago, built in 1884–1885. While its height is not considered very impressive today, it was at that time. The architect, Major William Le Baron Jenney, created the first load-bearing structural frame. In this building, a steel frame supported the entire weight of the walls, instead of load-bearing walls carrying the weight of the building, which was the usual method. This development led to the "Chicago skeleton" form of construction. After Jenney's accomplishment the sky was truly the limit as far as building was concerned.
Sullivan's Wainwright Building in St. Louis, 1891, was the first steel-framed building with soaring vertical bands to emphasize the height of the building, and is, therefore, considered by some to be the first true skyscraper.
Most early skyscrapers emerged in the land-strapped areas of Chicago, London, and New York toward the end of the 19th century. A land boom in Melbourne, Australia between 1888-1891 spurred the creation of a significant number of early skyscrapers, though none of these were steel reinforced and few remain today. Height limits and fire restrictions were later introduced. London builders soon found building heights limited due to a complaint from Queen Victoria, rules that continued to exist with few exceptions until the 1950s. Concerns about aesthetics and fire safety had likewise hampered the development of skyscrapers across continental Europe for the first half of the twentieth century (with the notable exceptions of the 26-storey Boerentoren in Antwerp, Belgium, built in 1932, and the 31-storey Torre Piacentini in Genoa, Italy, built in 1940). After an early competition between New York City and Chicago for the world's tallest building, New York took the lead by 1895 with the completion of the American Surety Building, leaving New York with the title of tallest building for many years. New York City developers competed among themselves, with successively taller buildings claiming the title of "world's tallest" in the 1920s and early 1930s, culminating with the completion of the Chrysler Building in 1930 and the Empire State Building in 1931, the world's tallest building for forty years. The first completed World Trade Center tower became the world's tallest building in 1972 for two years. That changed with the completion of the Sears Tower (later renamed the Willis Tower) in Chicago in 1974, which became the world's tallest building for several decades.
From the 1930s onwards, skyscrapers also began to appear in Latin America (São Paulo, Caracas,Bogotá,Mexico City) and in Asia (Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manila, Singapore, Mumbai, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Bangkok). Immediately after World War II, the Soviet Union planned eight massive skyscrapers dubbed "Stalin Towers" for Moscow; seven of these were eventually built. The rest of Europe also slowly began to permit skyscrapers, starting with Madrid, in Spain, during the 1950s. Finally, skyscrapers also began to be constructed in cities of Africa, the Middle East and Oceania (mainly Australia) from the late 1950s.
In the early 1960s structural engineer Fazlur Khan realized that the rigid steel frame structure that had "dominated tall building design and construction so long was not the only system fitting for tall buildings", marking "the beginning of a new era of skyscraper revolution in terms of multiple structural systems."[20] His central innovation in skyscraper design and construction was the idea of the "tube" structural system, including the "framed tube", "trussed tube", and "bundled tube".[21] These systems allowed far greater economic efficiency,[22] and also allowed efficient skyscrapers to take on various shapes, no longer needing to be box-shaped.[23] Over the next fifteen years, many towers were built by Khan and the "Second Chicago School",[24] including the massive 442-meter (1,451-foot) Willis Tower.[25] Chicago is currently undergoing an epic construction boom that will greatly add to the city's skyline. Since 2000, at least 40 buildings at a minimum of 50 stories high have been built or planned.[26] The Chicago Spire, Trump International Hotel and Tower, Waterview Tower, Mandarin Oriental Tower, 29-39 South LaSalle, Park Michigan, and Aqua are some of the more notable projects currently underway in the city that invented the skyscraper. Chicago, Hong Kong, and New York City, otherwise known as the "the big three," are recognized in architectural circles as having especially compelling skylines. A landmark skyscraper can inspire a boom of new high-rise projects in its city, as Taipei 101 has done in Taipei since its opening in 2004. Large cities currently experiencing skyscraper building booms include London in the United Kingdom, Shanghai in China, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and Miami, which now is third in the United States.[27]
At the beginning of the 20th century, New York City was a center for the Beaux-Arts architectural movement, attracting the talents of such great architects as Stanford White and Carrere and Hastings. As better construction and engineering technology became available as the century progressed, New York and Chicago became the focal point of the competition for the tallest building in the world. Each city's striking skyline has been composed of numerous and varied skyscrapers, many of which are icons of 20th century architecture:
Momentum in setting records passed from the United States to other nations with the opening of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1998. The record for world's tallest building remained in Asia with the opening of Taipei 101 in Taipei, Taiwan, in 2004. A number of architectural records, including those of the world's tallest building and tallest free-standing structure, will move to the Middle East with the opening of the Burj Dubai in Dubai, UAE.
This geographical transition is accompanied by a change in approach to skyscraper design. For much of the twentieth century large buildings took the form of simple geometrical shapes. This reflected the "international style" or modernist philosophy shaped by Bauhaus architects early in the century. The last of these, the Willis Tower and World Trade Center towers in New York, erected in the 1970s, reflect the philosophy. Tastes shifted in the decade which followed, and new skyscrapers began to exhibit postmodernist influences. This approach to design avails itself of historical elements, often adapted and re-interpreted, in creating technologically modern structures. The Petronas Twin Towers recall Asian pagoda architecture and Islamic geometric principles. Taipei 101 likewise reflects the pagoda tradition as it incorporates ancient motifs such as the ruyi symbol. The Burj Dubai draws inspiration from traditional Arabic art. Architects in recent years have sought to create structures that would not appear equally at home if set in any part of the world, but that reflect the culture thriving in the spot where they stand.
For current rankings of skyscrapers by height, see List of tallest buildings in the world.
The following list measures height of the roof. The more common gauge is the highest architectural detail; such ranking would have included Petronas Towers, built in 1998. See List of tallest buildings in the world for details.
| Built | Building | City | Country | Roof | Floors | Pinnacle | Current status | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1873 | Equitable Life Building | New York | 142 ft | 43 m | 8 | Demolished | |||
| 1889 | Auditorium Building | Chicago | 269 ft | 82 m | 17 | 349 ft | 106 m | Standing | |
| 1890 | New York World Building | New York City | 309 ft | 94 m | 20 | 349 ft | 106 m | Demolished | |
| 1894 | Manhattan Life Insurance Building | New York City | 348 ft | 106 m | 18 | Demolished | |||
| 1899 | Park Row Building | New York City | 391 ft | 119 m | 30 | Standing | |||
| 1901 | Philadelphia City Hall | Philadelphia | 511 ft | 155.8 m | 9 | 548 ft | 167 m | Standing | |
| 1908 | Singer Building | New York City | 612 ft | 187 m | 47 | Demolished | |||
| 1909 | Met Life Tower | New York City | 700 ft | 213 m | 50 | Standing | |||
| 1913 | Woolworth Building | New York City | 792 ft | 241 m | 57 | Standing | |||
| 1930 | 40 Wall Street | New York City | 70 | 927 ft | 283 m | Standing | |||
| 1930 | Chrysler Building | New York City | 925 ft | 282 m | 77 | 1,046 ft | 319 m | Standing | |
| 1931 | Empire State Building | New York City | 1,250 ft | 381 m | 102 | 1,454 ft | 443 m | Standing | |
| 1972 | World Trade Center (North tower) | New York City | 1,368 ft | 417 m | 110 | 1,727 ft | 526.3 m | Destroyed | |
| 1974 | Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) | Chicago | 1,451 ft | 442 m | 108 | 1,729 ft | 527 m | Standing | |
| 2003 | Taipei 101 | Taipei City | 1,474 ft | 448 m | 101 | 1,671 ft | 509 m | Standing | |
| 2009 | Burj Dubai | Dubai | 2,684 ft | 818 m | 162 | 2,684 ft | 818 m | Topped-out | |
Source: emporis.com
Today, skyscrapers are an increasingly common sight where land is scarce, as in the centres of big cities, because they provide such a high ratio of rentable floor space per unit area of land. But they are built not just for economy of space. Like temples and palaces of the past, skyscrapers are considered symbols of a city's economic power. Not only do they define the skyline, they help to define the city's identity.
At the time Taipei 101 broke the half-kilometer mark in height, it was already technically possible to build structures towering over a kilometer above the ground. Proposals for supertall structures of this sort have been put forward, including the Nakheel Tower,[32] to be built in Dubai of the United Arab Emirates; its developer, Nakheel, intends it to overtake the Burj Dubai already set to claim world records in the same city. Other proposed buildings include The Mile Tower to be built in Jeddah, KSA[33][34] and Burj Mubarak Al Kabir in Kuwait. Kilometer-plus structures present architectural challenges that may eventually place them in a new architectural category.[35]
The following skyscrapers are either approved or due to be completed in the near future:
The skyscraper as a concept is a product of the industrialized age, made possible by cheap energy and raw materials. The amount of steel, concrete and glass needed to construct a skyscraper is vast, and these materials represent a great deal of embodied energy. Tall skyscrapers are very heavy, which means that they must be built on a sturdier foundation than would be required for shorter, lighter buildings. Building materials must also be lifted to the top of a skyscraper during construction, requiring more energy than would be necessary at lower heights. Furthermore, a skyscraper consumes a lot of electricity because potable and non-potable water must be pumped to the highest occupied floors, skyscrapers are usually designed to be mechanically ventilated, elevators are generally used instead of stairs, and natural lighting cannot be utilized in rooms far from the windows and the windowless spaces such as elevators, bathrooms and stairwells.
Despite these costs, the size of skyscrapers allows for high-density work and living spaces, reducing the amount of land given over to human development. Mass transit and commercial transport are economically and environmentally more efficient when serving high-density development than suburban or rural development. Also, the total energy expended towards waste disposal and climate control is relatively lower for a given number of people occupying a skyscraper than that same number of people occupying modern housing.[citation needed] Indeed, though the city of Paris, for example, has almost the population density of Manhattan, Paris' stringent building codes and unchanging borders have made it difficult to create the larger buildings and utilities needed for a growing population within the actual city limits. This inflexibility has led many important institutions and departments to locate outside of city limits (such as the La Défense business district and the Department of Transportation).
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| Translations: Skyscraper |
Dansk (Danish)
n. - skyskraber
Nederlands (Dutch)
wolkenkrabber
Français (French)
n. - gratte-ciel
Deutsch (German)
n. - Wolkenkratzer
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ουρανοξύστης
Italiano (Italian)
grattacielo
Português (Portuguese)
n. - arranha-céu (m)
Русский (Russian)
небоскреб, высотный дом
Español (Spanish)
n. - rascacielos
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - skyskrapa
中文(简体)(Chinese (Simplified))
摩天楼, 超高层大楼, 特别高的东西
中文(繁體)(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 摩天樓, 超高層大樓, 特別高的東西
한국어 (Korean)
n. - 마천루, (쾌속 범선의) 맨 위의 돛, (여러 층의) 대형 샌드위치
日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 超高層ビル, 摩天楼, 高層建築物
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) ناطحه سحاب
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - גורד שחקים
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