Recently, while looking at this picture of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a thought came to my mind: What are the most stories any pre-skyscraper building ever had?
I guess most skyscapers came into being in the early 20th century. I also read once as a child that elevators were pivotal in making skyscrapers a reality. But there must have been more to it than that. Modern technology clearly has alot to do with it, it would seem.
So I guess my question is twofold: what are the most stories any pre-skyscraper ever had? I am talking about ancient buildings, like the pyramids, of course. (And by “stories”, I mean floors people could stand and walk on.) And was there indeed any limit (please give the reason why, if there was)?
People just didn’t build high; there was no need to. There was always room to expand outward, so there was no need to build upward. The disadvantages of having to bring things up several stories were not worth trying to overcome – you just built on a lot down the road a bit.
How high could they be? Well, some castles got fairly high: Rochester Castle is the tallest in the UK at 111 feet. In that case, of course, height had an advantage in battle and, of course, the castle was best in one strategic location, so the disadvantage of schlepping up to the top was weighed against he military advantage of the height.
So it’s not an engineering issue; it’s more an issue of, “what’s the point?” Until land became scarce, and elevators were invented (originally to lift freight), there was no reason to build a tall building.
It was also expensive. All the tall buildings were built as monuments to something (the progression of tallest man-made structure stars with the Great Pyramid, then the Cologne Cathedral (1880), the Washington Monument (1884), the Eiffel Tower (1889) and finally the first actual livable structure, the Chrysler Building (1930).
Elevators were much more important than technology. Once elevators came into use, stone skyscrapers were built in American cities. The tallest masonry-load skyscraper is Chicago’s Monadnock Building at 17 stories and 197 feet. Nobody would ever build such a monster without elevators.
A number of cities, from ancient Rome to 19th century Paris, used a housing model in which the first floor or two was lived in by the wealthy owners, with the floors above broken into apartments. The higher up the apartment, the less it cost because of the difficulty of needing to bring everything up and down the stairs all the time. Most apartment buildings of this sort went to three or four stories, with some topping out at six or seven. I’ve read of individual buildings that hit double-digits but I don’t know how reliable these accounts are.
The answer also depends on what your definition of a building and a story is. As Chuck mentioned, castle towers were built as high as possible so that they could command as much territory as possible. These would normally be divided into rooms for various uses at the various landings. It’s possible that some of them would have permanent or semi-permanent inhabitants.
One of the tallest pre-elevator buildings was Philadelphia City Hall, at 548 feet. It also predates steel-frame skyscrapers, and has 22-foot thick solid granite walls at the base to hold everything up.
There is engineering involved. Before steel framing, the weight of big buildings was mostly borne by masonry walls, which themselves weigh a lot. So for tall buildings, the lower walls had to be very thick, or extensively buttressed.
A better page is Apartment. That gives many examples of tall apartments in a variety of cultures.
As I said, though, the reliability of some of these cites may be lower than I would normally accept as given. I sure wouldn’t want to get that ox up fourteen stories, or the food needed to feed it.
I would presume that the oxen were on the ground, walking around a vertical axle geared to operate some kind of continuous bucket-and-pulley arrangement, rather than a traditional water wheel. I can’t really imagine how a water wheel system could get that high, and anyway rooftop gardens don’t need that kind of volume.
At some point, it becomes a debate about what counts as a “building”. I’ve been to the top of the Ulmer Münster (started in 1377, completed in 1890). It’s amazing what you can accomplish in 500 years if you put your mind to it.
Angkor Wat has some tall buildings, of at least 65 meters.
I climbed halfway up one; it had a staircase but with a very steep rise. Halfway up I remembered I have a paralyzing acrophobia :smack: , gathered my courage, and carefully backed down.
The existence of elevators long predates skyscrapers. You can see freight elevators in Pieter Brueghel’s painting the Tower of Babel from the 16th century. They were probably in use at the time of the actual ziggurats, for that matter. What Otis invented in 1861 was the safety elevator, which would automatically lock if the hoist broke. After that elevators became more common. But it was probably the steel-frame construction technique, more than the elevator, that was responsible for skyscrapers (the elevators had already been invented, and were perfect once the construction technique was perfected.) As noted above, without the steel frame, your building was limited by the design you used and the compressive strength of your construction material, and if you tried to build too high you had a practically solid ground floor. With a steel frame, the sky was almost literally the limit, and those lower floors could be open and useful.
Cal is correct, but I want to amplify one critical point.
The operational factor behind tall office buildings is the ratio of rentable space to ground area. The problem with masonry-load structures was that the bottom floors needed walls so thick - 10-20 feet thick - that they took up too much of the most expensive space.
Steel-framed buildings reduced the load-bearing area to a minimum, allowing for maximum usable space. And that minimum was essentially uniform throughout the building, although even with steel the bottom floors do require more structural load. It’s just a much smaller percentage.
Even today the maximum height of a building is limited not by the strength of the steel (or, increasingly, concrete) but by the increasing amount of non-rentable space that the elevator systems require. Anything above a certain height is ego rather than commercial sense, and both the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings passed that height in the race to create the tallest buildings. Techniques are somewhat more sophisticated today, but the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, is pretty much an economic disaster, too tall for sense in a downward economy.
The point is that the height of buildings has always been constrained more by the usefulness of the higher floors than by mere technological limitations. Pyramids could go 500 feet, but the top wasn’t functional. Cathedrals could soar if buttressed, but getting to the top was the equivalent of a pilgrimage.
What workable elevators did was greatly lift the easily reachable height. Steel then made height an even better return on investment. A mile-high building has been possible for a long time but it would lose so much money that nobody seriously tries to build one, even though it gets announced on a regular basis.
The cathedral at Slisbury, I think it was, still had the wheel in the attic used to haul the materials up to the roof. A lot of european cathedrals, built in the 1000’s and 1100’s or so, were pretty tall.
I too was thinking of the buildings along the Golden Mile leading up to Edinburgh Castle. From the front they are only about 6 or 7 stories, but from the back they can be 10 stories (storeys) or more since the ridge fell off steeply on each side. They avoided the masonry problem because IIRC they use thick wood beam construction especially for the higher parts, and so the “prime real estate” is actually on the 5th floor or so; which also reduces the elevator problem. I suppose part of the modern miracle is that they have not burned down packed so close for 500 years.
The snag with Edinburgh, as md2000 somewhat incoherently touches on, is the lie of the land. The Old Town was built on a series of very pronouced east-west volcanic ridges, so adjacent streets are often at wildly different levels. The result was that one could build tenements up the side of a ridge such that the bottom of the building was accessable from the valley floor - for example, the Cowgate - while the natural access to the upper stories was via the much higher Royal Mile.
These Edinburgh tenements thus don’t count as freestanding structures.