I love the Empire State Building. Just an amazing piece of architectural history, as is the Chrysler Building of course.
I don’t find that terribly convincing regarding the present distribution of very tall buildings. You do note that the study only included the period 1890-1915? It doesn’t address the construction of buildings as tall as the Chrysler or the Empire State, which came much later.
I find that his opinion is not convincing. Certainly not enough to support a flat out declaration that the other view is an urban myth.
The depth of the underpinning is proportional to the height of the building. Very tall buildings need massive foundations. Digging them for the Empire State Building was hugely expensive. “Two twelve-hour shifts, consisting of 300 men each, worked continuously to dig the 55-foot (17 m) foundation.” Even so they took two months to finish.
Like the others, I’m not believing that the paper’s findings can be extended past the period of relatively low skyscrapers to the super-tall period.
You’d also think that if location were the only criterion, the “valley” between midtown and downtown would have filled in more over 100 years. It’s stayed relatively low in height despite the tremendous increase in land costs.
The 1915 cutoff also has another huge flaw, caught by architecture critic Paul Goldberger.
Goldberger agrees that location was the primary driver, but reminds us that he’s talking about a different period, the one one following Barr’s.
Barr later wrote a major book, Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan’s Skyscrapers. I haven’t read it and it’s not in my library system, but I hope that he expands on his studies to cover the last century.
I think Barr and colleagues focused on pre-1915 buildings because that was an era when foundation costs might still have made a difference regarding location or whether to go taller. There weren’t yet zoning controls that would taint a pure regression analysis.
For modern steel buildings on a few caisson foundations drilled to bedrock, it’s a much smaller part of the pro forma, and in Chicago—built on a marsh—any building over 12 stories will have such foundations. For a 40-story building, the extra cost of drilling 16 or 20 caissons to -100 rather than -30 is not much more than rounding error.
Not much to add, except to strongly recommend this David Macaulay book, about the fictional disassembly of the Empire State Building - striking illustrations, and lots of good stuff about how the ESB was built in the first place: Amazon.com
You need three categories anyway – buildings, guyed towers and unguyed towers. The CN Tower was never the tallest structure in the world, but the structures taller than it were 2000-ft guyed masts.
IMO, I don’t count those newer buildings like the Zero World Trade Center, which are mostly air at the top. There has to be an observation deck - if you cannot just stand on top like WTC2.
When I brought my wife to Manhattan, I was very much leaning towards 30 Rock, where you can look downtown and see the ESB and Chrysler, and once could see WTC1 and WTC2 even further.
We did the ESB. After the 2+ hours, a cool thing was that we had the opportunity to go to the 102nd floor observatory (the usual is 86th).
I had a two-week consulting job there, on the 72nd floor. The old-style windows opened fully. And it was cool walking from Penn Station to the non-tourist entryway (all art-deco) and taking the elevator up.