I watched a movie in which Criminal Mastermind proposes to stage a superhuman cage fight on top of a skyscraper. He’s also planning some destruction involving a chemical lab, also located in the skyscraper. I thought it odd that the buildings owners, and the city building codes, would allow a chemical lab on a skyscraper. So I made some calls, and I’ll be damned, they’ll let us open any kind of businesses we want. There are 80 floors. So far, only the 50th is fully occupied, by the chem lab. So what sort of business are you opening?
I’ve leased some of the gleaming corridors of the 51st floor. I’m opening a small gas station. Sure, not much traffic up here, but not much competition, either. “But Cap’n…”, you say, “…what about the enormous weight of those steel gasoline storage tanks, so high up?” Well, I have that figured out. I’m going to use tanks made out of the same sturdy plastic used for water jugs. “But Cap’n…”, you say, “…gasoline melts those water jugs!” No problem; my plastic storage tanks will be DOUBLE thick.
I thought you were going to talk about that postmodern Leaning Tower of San Francisco, where if you place a ball on one corner of your $12 million penthouse suite, you’ll have to retrieve it from the other end as if you live on a cruise ship.
It’s the Ryugyong Hotel, which has been termed “the worst building in the world.” Begun in 1987, initially scheduled to be done in 1989, finally topped out in 1992 it remains unoccupied today.
It began, of course, as a glorious emblem of North Korea and a focus of national pride. After construction ground to a halt, anyone who wanted to stay out of trouble learned never to photograph, mention or take any notice of what is very much the tallest and most prominent building in Pyongyang.
OP, if an inferno ever breaks out in your tower, make sure you DON’T let [sub]McQueen[/sub]/[sup]Newman[/sup] blow those tanks on 51; definitely contraindicated.
You know what I think is funny? If you call the code people and tell them you’re building a structure 1,000 feet long and every exit is going to be at one end they’d laugh you out of the zoning office, but tell them you’ll stand it on end and an 80 story building has every exit on the bottom and Bob’s your uncle.
I think I saw the same movie, and yes, it seemed weird to have a chemical lab in a skyscraper downtown.
As for worst skyscraper ever, I nominate this building in Mumbai. It was built by the richest man in India and cost something like two billion dollars and yet it’s absolutely ugly.
It’s not perfect, but it’s my favorite building in the thread. At least some thought was put into it and it’s quite obviously a building, albeit a Dr-Seuss-meets-Le Corbusier- building. I’d rather live in it than an anonymous glass box.
It looks like the Ambani boys said “Hey, I know, let’s build a $2 billion skyscraper in the back yard! It’ll be our Secret Clubhouse! We can get some scrap materials from that construction site down the block!”
As to the OP: Don’t forget to have some kind of Master Control Computer that runs all the security and fire suppression systems and lights and elevators and communications and everything for the entire building. For convenience, the MCC should be fully accessible from the Internet, but for security reasons there should probably also be some kind of special card or USB drive or attache case or something required to access the MCC, that you can carry with you at all times (except for the backup Security MacGuffin, which you can keep in a secure vault with a giant steel door, state of the art laser-based security system, pressure-sensitive alarms in the vault floors, and a nice big skylight, so you can use sunlight to illuminate the vault and save a few bucks on electric bills–gotta be environmentally conscious, these days).
