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In the 160 or so years since the first skyscrapers were built, technological innovations of many kinds have allowed us to build them to reach astonishing heights. Today there is a 1,000-meter (167-story) building under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Even taller buildings are possible with today's structural technology.
But people still don't really live in skyscrapers the way futurists had envisioned, for one reason: Elevators go only up and down. In the "Harry Potter" movies, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and others, we see cableless boxes that can travel not just vertically but horizontally and even diagonally. Today, that future might be closer than ever. A new system invented and being tested by German elevator producer ThyssenKrupp would get rid of cables altogether and build elevators more like magnetic levitation trains, which are common in Japan and China.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2017-08-reengineering-elevators-21st-century-cities.html
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:03AM (14 children)
Build high rise pyramids. Such that the elevator area to usable space factor improves. It means super structure can be shared among projects. And that escape during a fire can be made horizontally as well as vertically. Wind sensitivity and earth quake instability improves as the building can't "go" anywhere.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:13AM
That's right. Build pyramids to your billionaire gods. Who do you serve? Bezos? Musk? Zuck?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by lx on Wednesday August 09 2017, @07:33AM (12 children)
I know some geeks think think daylight is overrated, but most of us do like to have windows in our homes. Pyramids are all volume, with very little surface for daylight access.
High rises are on their way out anyway. They are an inefficient way to house people compared to more horizontal architecture. Fun prestige projects for ageing megalomaniac developers and dictators.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @08:14AM
Green open spaces? Like gardens, parks and such... It's hard to find those in buildings with apartments higher than ground floor.
Maybe it is better to start thinking about how to better to lay out and run our cities, instead of just going up/down to house more people on the same square meter of ground.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @08:45AM (6 children)
Apart from needing stairs and elevators, how are high-rises inefficient? Are you thinking of the steel framing?
Building in a more horizontal fashion means more land will be used and horizontal journeys will be longer (urban sprawl). The framing can be lighter, but a greater area of roofing is needed.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:36PM (5 children)
Also need to consider vertical journeys being longer. I lived in a high rise dorm for a year a long time ago, and it sucked. During "rush hour" it often took more than 10 minutes to get an elevator ride to the ground. Living in a burb today, it always takes less than 10 minutes from sitting at my desk to entering the locker room of my gym two miles away. Its very weird to consider that 200 or so vertical feet is further away than 10000 horizontal feet in terms of wasted time.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:43PM (4 children)
it always takes less than 10 minutes from sitting at my desk to entering the locker room of my gym two miles away
Ahh yes, the old "drive 2 miles to the gym, run 4 miles on the treadmill, drive 2 miles back" gig :D
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 09 2017, @09:13PM (2 children)
treadmills are like boats, lots of fun to use someone elses, but an expensive PITA to keep operating.
I have one in front of my rarely watched TV. Hipsters like walking desks but I have a walking TV at home. A replacement belt is $150. Something I find a little weird is I have to replace the belt every ten or dozen times I replace running shoes. I don't know why shoes cost $75 and you only get 500-1000 miles on a pair but a treadmill that you step on gets 10k miles and only costs twice as much. Carefully engineered obsolescence to maximize profit, I suppose. The idea of running shoes lasting 10K miles is interesting and the fact my treadmill (and car tires) last tens of thousands of miles seems to imply its possible but the marketplace won't permit it, which is interesting. Anyway, the best treadmill is one you don't own.
As the old saying goes, if it flies, floats, or ... is a treadmill, you're better off renting it.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday August 10 2017, @10:51AM (1 child)
I have a footpath, it's like a treadmill but the belt is 25,000 miles long
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 10 2017, @11:43AM
Hows the HVAC? Where I live the wx outdoors is really nice about 4 months per year. Not so good the rest of the year. I really enjoy hiking but its more of an "extra luxury" when ma nature cooperates, rather than something I do every day more or less before lunch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @09:47PM
I make the same assumption. However, some athletes are able [dailymail.co.uk] to run 2 miles in under 10 minutes. It would be fair to compare that with travel via stairs. A study [springer.com] of people "with an average age of 23.4 years" (supposedly representative of the general population in South Korea) found that
That's for 50 storeys of stairs; for the first 20 storeys, ascents were consistently faster by about 60%. Assuming 200 feet is about 20 storeys and is about 61 m, an average female college student could be expected to ascend the distance in 79 seconds: (160% / 100%) * (60.96 m) / (0.48 m/s). Ascents, surprisingly, could be slightly faster (I'm going by what the abstract says) at around 82 seconds: (60.96 m) / (0.74 m/s). Men are faster.
I don't suppose the poster runs to the gym, but instead takes a private car. The great-great-grandparent post [soylentnews.org] asserted that high-rises are "inefficient." The comparison of a private car to an elevator is a fair one, although an elevator is more like mass transit because it's shared. The use of people's time is certainly a form of efficiency. Other obvious forms are the use of money, energy, land, and materials. In the design of the building where elevator trips took more than 10 minutes, travel time was obviously not the priority. Where it is, multiple, fast elevators are used. That takes more money, energy, land, and materials, but I would hazard a guess that it's still more efficient in all of those than having private cars for everyone and the attendant roads, parking and maintenance for them. I pose it as an either-or proposition because when people live in tower blocks, amenities such as a gym are often in the same building; a group of tower blocks can house enough people to justify a bus or train stop and/or a taxi stand; hence private cars are not a necessity. An elevator is egalitarian: it can be readily used by people who use wheelchairs, are blind, are otherwise in ill health (e.g. needing oxygen, subject to seizures or narcolepsy) or are very young or very old. Such people have difficulty driving cars. Having a car is a considerable expense; for people who work for their money, that means that they spend time working for money to buy, fuel/charge and maintain the car and a place to park it (whether in a garage or on the street). Mass transit in a suburb--where it exists at all--can be frustrating in the distance walked to a bus stop and the amount of time spent waiting for a bus.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:29PM (2 children)
Actually they're pretty good, its not like they're spheres. Also there's no reason the sides have to be smooth, a "wrinkly brain like surface" would expose a hell of a lot of surface area for daytime living.
The interior would be handy for the vast amount of infrastructure where people don't look out windows. Big box stores don't need windows. Amazon warehouses don't need windows. Light (or heavy?) industry doesn't need windows. Water treatment plants (going both in, and out) don't need windows. Libraries, museums, and art galleries don't technically need windows and lack of UV would probably be a minor bonus. Movie theaters and other event-oriented sites don't need windows, if you're so bored at a concert that you're looking out the window then you went to the wrong concert. Also consider indoor gardening, if the interior footage is cheap enough people may not like visiting the warehouse vertical farm, but they'll enjoy the fresh food... Where there are no windows there will be solar panels so its quite reasonable to turn an excess of power into extremely fresh lettuce.
Yes the bottom layer will have an inordinate amount of windowless support infrastructure but that's OK because the top layers will have approximately no support square footage available, it all kinda average out. Interesting to think about... the lower your apartment, the closer you are to services and nightlife and fun and work. The folks on top have a nice view but a long commute to the hospital or amazon food deliveries are late compared to the folks on the same level as the feature.
(Score: 2) by Murdoc on Thursday August 10 2017, @12:00AM (1 child)
For the bottom floors don't forget factories, power generation, large-scale storage... basically all your industrial stuff. And a big structure like that is going to need lots of environmental equipment, such as air circulation, heating, cooling, plumbing, fire suppression, etc. Might as well put it all down there. Maybe a big train station to get to the other pyramids or wherever. Oh, and a supercomputer to control it all. :)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 10 2017, @12:09PM
Yeah datacenters and UPS battery farms and hospitals and stuff like that.
Also gotta be realistic, only maybe 5% of the population has a "thing" about requiring a window, most of the planet is pretty cool with their work cubicle or bedroom closet or shower stall not having an outdoor window. Along the lines of it would be nice to have the corner office even if the vast overwhelming majority of employees do not.
Just being realistic, google claims the worlds largest shopping mall has just under 3 million square feet, approximately none of which has windows. The great pyramid in Egypt is only half a million square feet. So rather theoretically you could demolish the "Mall of America" in Minnesota and replace it with six great pyramids. Or more realistically we already have structures "way the hell bigger" than what people think of as a giant pyramid. Something a mere couple times the size of the Luxor hotel in Vegas would be quite large while appearing to be quite usable at a human scale (assuming you think the Luxor hotel in Vegas is humane, etc...)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by nobu_the_bard on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:36PM
Building up is still advantageous when land space is limited. It'll likely always remain popular in urban core areas.