Tuned Mass Damping is your friend to reduce wind swaying in tall buildings.
I think of the Sim City 2000 arcologies, which would launch if you reached a certain level:
What issue are you thinking of? We already have to pump water up to supply anything higher than a few stories. The Willis Tower has pumps in the basement, 31st floor, 64th floor, and 88th floor. Want to go higher? Add another pump every 20-30 stories or so until you reach the top of your arbitrarily high building. Likewise, the drain problem has already been solved, too (see link).
Not meaning to be a wise-ass at all with this statement: Perception is reality. I clearly remember several visits to the World Trade Centers in NYC. A few tourist visits to the Observation Deck, a few working trips using the series of freight elevators to move gear up to Windows On The World restaurant.
The express elevators that ferried people to Windows On The World took 58 seconds for the trip.
It always seemed a very long elevator ride- and yet in the context of very tall buildings, a single-shot 58-second ride really is not so long. A bit tough on the inner ear, if you know what I mean.
Taking the freight elevators was brutal. One had to give the better part of a day to drive into the underground loading docks complex, download, check in with normal building security, roll down the dock to the hallway to the Freight Elevators. Then wait your turn. And wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait. It was stunning how long it took. ( Yes, there were quite a few Freight Elevator cars, not just one. Cannot remember how man. 4? 6? ). And I do seem to remember that they - unlike the Windows On The World trip- were staggered. No way to do a straight shot ride up to the top in those.
I remember reading that the swaying in the Burj Khalifa’s upper floors have a pretty serious “seasickness” effect, so no doubt the Saudi building will be even worse in that regard. However, I also remember that the “Life After People” series showed the Burj surviving 250 years before collapsing from corrosion effects (after losing its glass windows early on), so it’s a pretty stable structure.
Dani Eder (formerly of Boeing) has expressed the opinion that a tall tower built upwards would be a useful accessory to a space elevator. The elevator hangs down from orbit to meet the top of a 50km tower, which supports its own weight, and can presumably withstand the effects of the Earth’s atmosphere better than a thin tape under tension.
See
I didn’t go through the entire discussion thoroughly, but my gist of it was that it was a minimal weight construct to try to lift launch elements above the atmosphere, not the extra sheer dead weight that a living building full of people would engender.
And Geoff Landis got one thing wrong that’s pertinent here: Wright did not “design” a mile high building in the 1930s. At best, he sketched one in 1956. Nobody today seriously believes it could have been built then, and Wright never provided enough information for us to know if it could be built today. BTW, he was 89 at the time.
Here’s a paper by Geoff Landis on the subject of tall buildings;
another science fiction author, Neal Stevenson, has also produced some theoretical work on tall towers, see
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3018510/straight-out-of-sci-fi-cyberpunk-author-plans-tallest-skyscraper-ever
he and his collaborator seem to think that the problem of wind will be significant, despite designing the structure as an open lattice.
As a Chicago tour guide, the subject of sway (structural drift) has interested me for several years. I can find standards that specify how much drift is permissible, but no one ever tells what the period of oscillation is. I would have thought the period would be 30 to 60 seconds, yet people always tell stories of sloshing in the toilet bowls.
Has anyone in this discussion ever witnessed that personally?
In a mile high tower not all users of the building would be going to the top. Make the top third condos and shopping/services for residents. Regarding elevators - The John Hancock Center does boast the world’s fastest elevator, flying you up 1,000 feet to the 94th floor observatory in a thrilling 40 seconds! (Its not all that thrilling coming down after a night at the 95th floor bar.)
Pizza delivery mightl be a bitch. On the other hand, I am not an architect. Nor do I deliver pizzas.
Soylent Green.
Randall Monroe tackled this question today in his What If series.
Not only did he apparently steal that from us, we did a much better job at answering the question. 
This was true when the Empire State Building was built. I have heard experts say that if the Empire State Building had the proper number of elevators to serve its office space, the entire first floor would be nothing but elevators.
But this problem was solved by the time they built the Sears Tower: multiple elevators in the same shaft. So in one shaft there will be an elevator serving floors 1-9, then above it one that serves 10-19, then above that one that serves 20-29 and so on.
Then there are express elevators from 1 to 10 or 20.
People would need to change elevators two times to reach their floor (three, for really tall buildings), but each ride would be pretty short, with the last one being the longest (although some folks on the 15th floor might prefer to take the express to 20, walk down one flight, then catch an empty elevator down from 19).
The big limit on elevators seems to be this: if they accelerate (or decelerate) faster than 1/10g, that will cause some people to vomit. Sears Tower found this out, and had to slow their elevators down.
The elevator problem got solved decades ago.
The limits today are:
- strength of building materials. The higher you build, the more weight is trying to crush the bottom floors (or the support columns).
- nature-proofing. As mentioned above, the wind gets faster the higher you go, and lets not forget earthquakes and stuff.
- making financial sense. Most super-tall buildings cost so much to build that it would have been cheaper to build two buildings half that height, even after buying more land. (As also was noted above)
Can someone explain the ‘Keira’ joke?
I lived in a small city of 15,000 people which had a full-time fire department and 10 police cruisers on duty at all times. I don’t see how making the city vertical instead of horizontal makes that less practical.
Any building big enough to have its own zip code is going to need its own emergency services, regardless of how it is oriented.
Dude, skyscrapers move.
Building skybridges between towers is super hard, because the towers move in relation to each other. They move a lot.
Wind blowing between the two towers of the World Trade Center would create a low pressure zone that drew the two buildings towards each other, and if I recall correctly the gap between them changing by 20 feet was not uncommon.
It would be WAY simpler to make a single tower that is just bigger at the bottom, with tunnels through it for the streets.
So the solution to the critical mass problem with arcologies probably isn’t “lots of towers”, but “massive tower” instead.
This can, interestingly, be partially fixed by the shape of the building.
I saw a tv show about two guys who designed a building they called “The Millennium Tower” (because if they could find somebody who wanted to build it, it could be finished by 2000). Their design was round and conical, and wind tunnel testing of a model showed that, accidentally, it was very stable in high winds.
I believe they said that as wind hit a large vertical area of the building, say 40 floors, the wind at the top would be faster than the wind at the bottom because the part of the building it was going around was smaller. This caused the wind to effectively hold the top part in place against the force of the wind on the lower part.
Maybe I’m remembering that wrong. I saw it a few times, but that was decades ago.
If you don’t fix that somehow, “slightly” isn’t the word I’d use. IIRC it is the John Hancock Tower where the residents of upper floors have to bolt their artwork to the walls to keep it from falling as the building sways. Tenants of the World Trade Center near the middle of its height reported windy days making them seasick, of a hallway that was “pitching like the deck of a ship in a storm”, and how anything left on your desk would migrate overnight due to the motion of the building.
I don’t know what you mean by this. The Willis (nee Sears) Tower has 16 double-deck (i.e. multiple floor) elevators, but I don’t think it has multiple elevators in a single shaft. In fact. I don’t think any tall building does. There are schemes to accomplish this, like the Levilator, but I’m not aware they have been put into practice anywhere. Certainly not extensively.
This introduces long wait times into almost every elevator ride instead of just some. Wait times are already a limiting factor.
The Willis Tower elevators - they have 104, BTW, top out at 8.1 m/s. The Taipei 101 building has elevators that top out at 16.8 m/s.
I disagree.
The emergency needs for a tall building are different from those of a city of separate smaller builders with varying degrees of construction safety built in.
The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur are connected by a skybridge that is designed partly to increase support during sway. The World Trade Center towers swayed from 1-3 feet in a heavy wind.
I’ve heard that the sway in skyscrapers helps them during earthquakes, that because of it the building stands a better chance of riding out an earthquake than does a low-rise building that ends up a pile of matchsticks. True or no?