Nothing lasts forever, it all depends on the vagaries of the planet’s surface and the forces of nature, tectonic plates are always moving, yet the Pont du Gard in the south af France is in perfect condition after 2.000 years, and Japan’s Fukushima atomic reactor is Kaput, with buildings having collapsed worldwide because of earthquakes. ‘Homo proponit, sed Deus disposit.’ (usually traslated as; Man proposes and God disposes.)
How the dickens did they know he’d be elected 549 years later?
I think the big question is in the future high rise-buildings will be too costly and too costly to repair.Give it some time 5+ story building will be too costly to build.
Why? Are we going to lose all technology in the future? As long as we keep modern technology, then cost per square foot of usable space will always be lower for taller buildings because of economies of scale.
It costy more to build high-rise buildings and the cost will keep going up to point it wil be prohibitively expensive.
For every location, there is an economic sweet spot for the amount of return possible on an investment. The starting costs are always large: buying the land, going through the permit process (a huge expense in places like NYC), clearing the land, digging the foundation, creating the infrastructure, and putting up the first floor. The second floor requires only the incremental costs of materials and labor, so is only a tiny fraction of the cost of the first floor.
There are diminishing returns the higher you go. Super tall buildings generally are trophies rather than economically viable for the odd but interesting reason that the floor space gradually gets eaten up by the elevators needed to transport people. The higher you go, the more elevators needed; that starts on the first floor and must be accounted for in the original planning.
The proper building for the location has a number of stories somewhere between 1 and 100. As long as we have our modern technology and economy, though, there can never be a time when cost would limit the number of stories to less than 5. That’s economically impossible. A 10-story building in a location that will fill all the offices or apartments will always return more on an investment than a 5-story building in that location. Same with a 20-story building or 40 or 80.
An individual building can be built too high to be profitable. Even so, most of the 1000+ foot buildings are doing very well. I can’t imagine any scenario in which a 5-story building is prohibitively expensive without a total collapse of society.
I was just saying it cheaper to build one to 5 story apartments /condos than high-rise apartments or condos.
Also geting more expensive now to build high-rise apartments or condos.
There will never be a point in time (unless society completely collapses) where it is no longer economically viable to build over 5 floors. Your position makes no damned sense.
Cheaper is not the same as more economical. Building the same number of apartments in 5-story or less buildings would be ten times more expensive.
Really? Then why is China building them by the tens of thousands? And so are dozens of other countries.
Go find some actual numbers to back up your claims. Right now they’re nonsense. You may have a point of some kind you think you’re making, but right now that’s not coming through.
Yes, I thought about putting the word ‘safety’ in there twice “they didn’t use it much until they got safety elevators, but the safety elevator was only invented”.
It seemed infelicitous.
Could one of my fellow Dopers please confirm for me that there is no “Palin Cathedral” anywhere in the world.
The big problem is the number of Paul Cathedrals in the world.