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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 09 2017, @05:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the wonkavator dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

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


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @05:51AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @05:51AM (#550960)

    Wat floor massa?

    • (Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:19AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:19AM (#550972)

      Penthouse full of dead bitches. Gonna fuck them while they're still fresh. Come back later to incinerate the bodies when they've lost their after death virginity.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:03AM (14 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:03AM (#550964) Journal

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:13AM (#550968)

      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)

      by lx (1915) on Wednesday August 09 2017, @07:33AM (#550993)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @08:14AM (#551010)

        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)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @08:45AM (#551022)

        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)

          by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:36PM (#551071)

          horizontal journeys will be longer (urban sprawl)

          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)

            by isostatic (365) on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:43PM (#551240) Journal

            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)

              by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 09 2017, @09:13PM (#551302)

              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)

                by isostatic (365) on Thursday August 10 2017, @10:51AM (#551552) Journal

                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

                  by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 10 2017, @11:43AM (#551566)

                  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

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @09:47PM (#551320)

              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

              The average descent speed for the male and female population was 0.83 m/s and 0.74 m/s, respectively, while the average ascent speed was 0.66 m/s and 0.48 m/s.

              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)

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:29PM (#551067)

        Pyramids are all volume, with very little surface for daylight access.

        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)

          by Murdoc (2518) on Thursday August 10 2017, @12:00AM (#551363) Homepage

          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

            by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 10 2017, @12:09PM (#551580)

            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

        by nobu_the_bard (6373) on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:36PM (#551070)

        Building up is still advantageous when land space is limited. It'll likely always remain popular in urban core areas.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:09AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:09AM (#550966)

    Going down? Regenerative braking is nice, when there is regenerative braking. If not, we call this "freefall". You'll be fine, until you reach the ground floor.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:15AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:15AM (#550969)

      Send only the poorest blackest kids to the bottom to break your fall.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @09:24AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @09:24AM (#551035)

      It would be strange for someone to design an elevator without taking into account the possibility of power failures.

      A conventional elevator has several types [washingtonpost.com] of brakes [howstuffworks.com]. The story doesn't say that these designs will have only one type. Also, the whole point of regenerative braking is to generate electricity from unwanted motion. It could be possible to generate enough power to run the electromagnets so that the descent can be slowed. If not, a battery could make up the difference, or a conventional type of brake, which stops the elevator when power is lost (see Wash. Post link), could be used.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @06:43AM (#550979)

    ThyssenKrupp, together with Siemens, built the trains for the maglev line to the Shanghai airport.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:20PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:20PM (#551063)

    we see cableless boxes that can travel not just vertically but horizontally and even diagonally.

    The future is unevenly distributed... we call the cableless boxless horizontal things "people movers" for some weird reason and the big international airports nearby me are full of them. Its pretty comfy. I wish we had them downtown in our skywalks, but we have too much diversity, etc.

    We call the cabless boxless diagonal elevators by the name "escalator". Back before retail started dying everyone used to go to the indoor mall which was full of escalators.

    The problem both have is cities and high real estate are dead, they just haven't started decomposing and smelling yet. They were an artifact of 20th century capitalism when the economy required 15K workers packed into a factory and then an office building of 10K file clerks manually adding accounting figures using paper and quill. Now 10K workers are in China factories and 10K file clerks are in India writing buggy cobol-like java, individually cheaper than the locals and as a group system far slower and more expensive than the locals. You could move my entire suburb into a Pentagon like high-rise but theres no point to it and no one wants it, although yeah sure its technologically possible, sure...

  • (Score: 2) by isj on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:29PM

    by isj (5249) on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:29PM (#551066) Homepage

    Tom Scott has a nice short video of it: https://youtu.be/kdTsbFS4xmI [youtu.be]

    I'm sure the Happy People Vertical Transporter will be delighted about the new possibilities.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @12:54PM (#551074)

    SIRIUS CYBERNETICS CORPORATION

    Elevators: Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and "maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital.

    This is because they operate on the curious principle of "defocused temporal perception." In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators.

    Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking.

    An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.

    Marketing division: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. *

    Products: it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.

    In other words- and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded- their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.

    *The editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by lgsoynews on Wednesday August 09 2017, @01:47PM (5 children)

    by lgsoynews (1235) on Wednesday August 09 2017, @01:47PM (#551087)

    The article makes a lot of wrong assumptions. Transportation issues are only a small part of the very tall buildings issues.

    The article present as _desirable_ a life where you are basically living in the heights & no longer go down (to street-level). Really? This is desirable?

    This is a perfect example of trying to solve a problem while ignoring all the other -much more important- issues.

    First, do you REALLY want to live at the 50th floor or higher? What's the REAL point of higher buildings (except in a very few places where there really is no room left, as in city-states)?

    Once you reach a certain height, there are no longer balconies, windows are not even designed to be opened. A better view? Not even true since there will be other buildings in the way!

    What about security? what about fires (I saw one in an hotel in London, it happens)? Haven't they watched "the towering inferno" movie?

    What about green spaces? Trees? Gardens? How do you walk, run, use a bicycle? Do they want people to stop walking altogether? Let's encourage obesity issues even more! (Remember, the article states that you _rarely_ will need to go to street level). It's even worse if you have children, where will they play? In the suburbs, you may have a lawn, a garden, even in a city (like where I live) there should be some parks with lawn, sandboxes, and sport equipment.

    So your job will be on the same building as well? Or a WHOLE CITY worth of buildings will have to be built and connected through those elevators. This would be fine on another planet, but it does not make sense on earth. We are not that packed -yet-.

    They also explain that there will be malls & stuff in the building. Not a new idea BTW. Do you imagine the nuisance factor? Noise, crowd... If you live near a mall (even a small one), you know what I mean, there is plenty of traffic, lots of noise from the delivery trucks early in the morning till late at night, lots of people make a huge amount of noise, you don't want to live near one of those.

    It's also obvious that you'll be surrounded by many other tall buildings, which will throw shadows on your appartment (and the taller the buildings, the higher the nuisance for everybody around). I don't know about you, but I like to see some real sunlight & real vegetation! If you think about it, you'll realize that there is no point in building such city above the surface, this system would make more sense with buried cities! Then the ground level would be dedicated to gardens, sport, walks, etc.

    I live in one of the most densely populated cities on earth (18 239 people per square kilometer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_density [wikipedia.org] ). There are a few tall buildings (built during the rush of the 60/70s), but nowadays, the maximum height is 7 stories (legal limit). I would NOT want to live above the 10th level, 7th is already quite high, and enough IMO.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @02:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @02:31PM (#551109)

      From the Wiki page for Boulogne-Billancourt (Paris inner suburb which matches your 18 239 density):

      > In 1929, the Bois de Boulogne, which was hitherto divided between the communes of Boulogne-Billancourt and Neuilly-sur-Seine, was annexed in its entirety by the city of Paris. On that occasion, Boulogne-Billancourt, to which most of the Bois de Boulogne belonged, lost about half of its territory.

      If your area still had the big park, you wouldn't be on the high density list...
      And not too surprisingly, all of Paris has density only a bit higher at 21 498, because the city planners left some big park areas.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:35AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:35AM (#551460)

      Say you have enough population in a given area to fill it completely with one-story buildings (so it's all streets, sidewalks, and buildings -- some residential, some business, but we'll blend them into a homogeneous mass). Now say you take every 3x3 region, tear down eight buildings, and convert the remaining one to a 10-story building for the same useable volume (10 instead of nine to allow for e.g. stairwells and elevator shafts). Isn't this better? Whether you put green spaces, parks, or whatever in those 8 spaces, you can probably see over it from 9 of the 10 floors, and there will be large gaps between all the nearby buildings. So same population density, more green/recreational spaces, and much better views.

      As for shadowing, specifically, that's actually interesting and complicated. The distance between neighboring buildings goes 0,1,2 as the height of buildings goes 1,4,9. It depends on the angle of sunlight, but some pretty serious shadowing is definitely likely if you take this approach very far. However, the duration of shading scales inversely with distance -- it bears watching, but I don't really see it as a big problem for tall buildings at comparable densities. (At high latitudes, even two-story buildings can make for oppressively dark streets at high density.)

      Same goes for your 7-story buildings -- how isn't it an improvement, given sufficiently-advanced elevators, to have a few 50-story buildings spaced well apart than many 7-stories close together? The argument, of course, is that you won't get a few sparse skyscrapers, you'll get many tightly packed, but there's no reason to allow that. Just require developers to provide a proportional amount of green/recreational spaces related to the height of the building they want to put in -- if they want a 50-some story skyscraper, make them buy up enough neighboring lots in all directions to provide the necessary cushion.

      I don't really like cities -- I'm much happier living in the country. But I did live in apartments in town when I was in school and for a few years after, and while it's true I wouldn't have wanted to live on the 50th floor, today's elevators are pretty much the entire reason why. (The stupidity about balconies/windows would bother me a bit, but as I have serious seasonal allergies, I spend some weeks with the windows sealed all the time -- I'm sure I could get used to living that way year-round.) If I could be assured of getting to the ground floor (or perhaps a basement parking garage) in 5 minutes, I really don't see any issue.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:39AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:39AM (#551463) Journal

      What's the REAL point of higher buildings (except in a very few places where there really is no room left, as in city-states)?

      Well, you mentioned a point right there.

      My view is that I don't care. Most of these really large projects are probably just prestige projects and I'm fine with that. If it should turn out that there is an advantage to living high, then these sorts of projects will eventually find it in addition to nurturing the engineering and construction ability to make such buildings.

    • (Score: 2) by gidds on Saturday August 12 2017, @01:18PM (1 child)

      by gidds (589) on Saturday August 12 2017, @01:18PM (#552837)

      what about fires (I saw one in an hotel in London, it happens)?

      I don't know if it's what you were referring to, but I doubt anyone in the UK could read that without thinking of Grenfell Tower [wikipedia.org], a 24-storey residential block in West London that caught fire a couple of months ago, causing at least 80 deaths (possibly over 100).

      I'm not sure if it made much news abroad, but in the UK it's been a national tragedy and a major story ever since, due partly to the horrific images of the inferno and its many-mile-long smoke trail, the 2½ days it took to extinguish, the already-known fire safety issues, the effect of recently-installed cladding in spreading the fire (and many hundreds of other blocks with similar cladding), it being public housing surrounded by more affluent areas, the poor handling of the tragedy by local and national authorities, and the issues it's raised about deregulation, underinvestment, and fire safety.

      (PS. "an hotel" looks dangerously hypercorrective.  If you pronounce the 'h', as is standard in English, then "a hotel" would make more sense; or "an 'otel" if you're French.  Sorry; it's a bugbear of mine.)

      --
      [sig redacted]
      • (Score: 2) by lgsoynews on Saturday August 12 2017, @04:46PM

        by lgsoynews (1235) on Saturday August 12 2017, @04:46PM (#552894)

        No, I was refering to something that happened about 4 years ago, when I was visiting London (I'm french).

        But I've read about the Tower fire when it happened. It is indeed a tragic -and shocking- example of mismanagement from all the authorities involved.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by mcgrew on Wednesday August 09 2017, @02:46PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Wednesday August 09 2017, @02:46PM (#551118) Homepage Journal

    Sheesh, kids... how about STAR TREK decades earlier?

    --
    mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
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