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Do Modern Skyscrapers hurt Street Life?


monsoon

Do Modern Skyscrapers hurt Street Life?  

46 members have voted

  1. 1. Do Modern Skyscrapers hurt Street Life?

    • No - they bring people to cities
      15
    • Yes - typically they do
      24
    • I don't know
      7


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The skyscraper is a very useful type of building especially when one is trying to get the most use out of a tiny sliver of expensive land. So they are here to stay. But they can be tamed to fit in with the rest of the city by using step backs and focusing much of the details down to street level instead of the tippy tops of the tower.

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Skyscrapers that interact with the street poorly hurt city street life. It is up to the city to eliminate empty plazas through zoning. In Providence our proposed towers feature street level activity through retail programming and are being built to the street.

The GTECH Center which is a midrise which had it's ribbon cutting last week is an office building with retail and restaurants on the ground level. Two sides of it front Waterplace park and will feature park level resturants with outdoor seating. It sits across Francis Street from Providence Place Mall. The mall has very heavy pedestrian traffic and having GTECH now will bring that pedestrian activity to the other side of the street.

Most of the other highrise activity happening in Providence now is residential or hotel.

The Residences at the Westin will feature additional hotel rooms for the existing Westin and luxury condos. Again, the ground floor will feature restaurant and retail spaces. The tower is built to the street and will bring life to Emmett Square which was formerly fronted by a lilttle used park that sat where the new tower is being built. The new Westin tower is also diagonally across the street from the GTECH Center and connected to the mall by a skybridge. The Westin serves as the main pedestrian entrance to the mall from Downcity.

The condos at Waterplace sit across Waterplace Park from GTECH Center. Again, the building fronts the street and the riverwalk with retail and restuarant in the ground floors. The driveway/plaza for the condos sit inside the project set back from the street.

The W Providence Hotel & Residences will be Rhode Island's new tallest building, again all sides fronting the street with no plaza set backs. The Westminster side will likely be dominated by lobbies for the residents and hotel, though the hotel lobby should be very busy with foot traffic. The other side of the block will feature a restuarant at the street. The whole project sits fast against the Arcade which is the oldest indoor shopping mall in America and should see a boost from the neighboring residents and hotel guests.

The Empire at Broadway should be breaking ground next year. It will be a highrise office building that may feature a residential or hotel component. Again, it will be built to the street with retail and restaurant programmed at the ground level. This project should bring new life to LaSalle Square and inject new energy into the neighboring theatre district and feed off events at the Civic Center which sits across LaSalle Square. It will also serve as a stepping stone between Downcity and the city's Little Italy, Federal Hill.

As long as city planners and the zoning board ensure that skyscrapers are built to engage the street, they shouldn't present a problem to street life.

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He probably means not being people friendly. I.e. something like the stark 60's urban renewal projects, which includes many skyscrapers designed in that era, that destroyed the urban fabric of manay Amreican urban centers. These buildings may look beautiful and majestic from a distance but can be stark and forboding up close. The featureless concrete plazas and blank walls of such buildings tend to make people shy away from them. The city of Huston, TX is a place that comes to my mind. From a distance Huston has a beautiful skyline but the inside the DT area things can be very antiseptic, bleak, and lifless. (Personal Opinion of course.)

Well I'm not sure what you mean by "poor," but I've heard that downtown Dallas really isn't too lively after 5pm.
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Do a lot of modern skyscrapers hurt street life? Yes

Is this a flaw of highrises in general? Don't think so.

I do think a skyscraper that's a success at ground level is harder to design than a 4-storey building because of their monolithic nature but it can be done. I agree with Gusterfell, there's no reason why those buildings couldn't be 50 stories high instead of 5. A 50-storey building that's uninteresting at street level is no worse than a 5-storey one that's just as uninteresting

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I've often wondered why small street level stores can't be built lining the existing behemouth plazas that sit underneath skyscrapers.

Of course it would be an afterthought architecturally, but better than nothing.

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Building Sky Scrappers or Vertical Tunnel Habitats?

If global warming truly becomes a problem then human populations may be forced to build underground where it is safe. This would also protect us from solar flares and solar radiation. Building vertical Tunnel habitats straight down instead skyscrapers makes a lot of sense.

For instance there is no way to crash an aircraft into a building, which goes straight down into the ground like the middle eastern Arab international terrorists did in 9/11. Once a vertical Tunnel was built straight down the walls could be fused together using laser molecular realignment technologies. This would make the walls stronger than steel by using the forces of molecular bonding to hold the wall in place while it was being built.

In doing this we would not have to make buildings, which goes straight up and we could connect the walls and the floors of the building laterally into the dirt and therefore it would be much stronger and cheaper to build. People could live in these underground vertical Tunnel habitats and then simply use an elevator to get up to the surface of the planet where they could catch transportation to the rest of the city.

As land and real estate prices get too expensive the buildings get higher and more dangerous. However, if we build downwards we have miles and miles to go before we ever run out to of the earth's crust to build into. Please consider this in 2006.

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Building Sky Scrappers or Vertical Tunnel Habitats?

If global warming truly becomes a problem then human populations may be forced to build underground where it is safe. This would also protect us from solar flares and solar radiation. Building vertical Tunnel habitats straight down instead skyscrapers makes a lot of sense.

For instance there is no way to crash an aircraft into a building, which goes straight down into the ground like the middle eastern Arab international terrorists did in 9/11. Once a vertical Tunnel was built straight down the walls could be fused together using laser molecular realignment technologies. This would make the walls stronger than steel by using the forces of molecular bonding to hold the wall in place while it was being built.

In doing this we would not have to make buildings, which goes straight up and we could connect the walls and the floors of the building laterally into the dirt and therefore it would be much stronger and cheaper to build. People could live in these underground vertical Tunnel habitats and then simply use an elevator to get up to the surface of the planet where they could catch transportation to the rest of the city.

As land and real estate prices get too expensive the buildings get higher and more dangerous. However, if we build downwards we have miles and miles to go before we ever run out to of the earth's crust to build into. Please consider this in 2006.

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Building Sky Scrappers or Vertical Tunnel Habitats?

If global warming truly becomes a problem then human populations may be forced to build underground where it is safe. This would also protect us from solar flares and solar radiation. Building vertical Tunnel habitats straight down instead skyscrapers makes a lot of sense.

For instance there is no way to crash an aircraft into a building, which goes straight down into the ground like the middle eastern Arab international terrorists did in 9/11. Once a vertical Tunnel was built straight down the walls could be fused together using laser molecular realignment technologies. This would make the walls stronger than steel by using the forces of molecular bonding to hold the wall in place while it was being built.

In doing this we would not have to make buildings, which goes straight up and we could connect the walls and the floors of the building laterally into the dirt and therefore it would be much stronger and cheaper to build. People could live in these underground vertical Tunnel habitats and then simply use an elevator to get up to the surface of the planet where they could catch transportation to the rest of the city.

As land and real estate prices get too expensive the buildings get higher and more dangerous. However, if we build downwards we have miles and miles to go before we ever run out to of the earth's crust to build into. Please consider this in 2006.

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Is this the kind of stuff we'll see in your book (you mentioned it in your intro thread)?

I am not a geologist, but digging long vertical holes must come with a whole different list of issues to overcome, like the fact the earth's crust is constantly moving causing numerous unaligned lateral forces at differing depths, the water table as mentioned, pressure differences, and of course heat issues. These may all be surmountable, but isn't digging also incredibly expensive? Not to mention flooding issues that aren't typically a factor with traditional above ground structures (I did say "typically"). Or cave-ins.

I haven't heard of laser molecular realignment technology, though sounds cool, got any links? Do you mean we can turn the random molecules found in soil (carbon, nitrogen, silicon, a variety of metals in tiny quantities, etc.) into steel quickly via a laser? I did a quick search of this and primarilly found you to be the author of the info, so curious what else is out there on it.

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Is this the kind of stuff we'll see in your book (you mentioned it in your intro thread)?

I am not a geologist, but digging long vertical holes must come with a whole different list of issues to overcome, like the fact the earth's crust is constantly moving causing numerous unaligned lateral forces at differing depths, the water table as mentioned, pressure differences, and of course heat issues. These may all be surmountable, but isn't digging also incredibly expensive? Not to mention flooding issues that aren't typically a factor with traditional above ground structures (I did say "typically"). Or cave-ins.

I haven't heard of laser molecular realignment technology, though sounds cool, got any links? Do you mean we can turn the random molecules found in soil (carbon, nitrogen, silicon, a variety of metals in tiny quantities, etc.) into steel quickly via a laser? I did a quick search of this and primarilly found you to be the author of the info, so curious what else is out there on it.

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Regarding the water issue, I have an interesting story, I met a gentleman who won a bid on an old Cold War Days Missile Silo and turned it into an apartment or rather tried too and had to deal with the ground water issues, with pumps. But with a Nano-carbon tube sheet coating and use of various liquid compounds put into the dirt walls and then super heated we could make a very strong wall 5-times that of cement and also consider flexible concrete compounds as well. The new materials of today will render totally new options tomorrow. As technology merges with the future new concepts become much more feasible and since the surface of the planet can be hostile, it makes sense to consider additional option in case of let's say an Ice Age and 80 Billion humans on the planet by 2100
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Tunnel Cities may work on the Moon or Mars. But here on mother Earth, why? Besides what about expense? Think of all of the billions the Euro-Tunnel or the Big Dig cost. Now imagine putting an entire city the size of Dallas undergound. Well needless to say the US national debt would be pocket change compared to the construction costs of somthing like that.

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Building Sky Scrappers or Vertical Tunnel Habitats?

If global warming truly becomes a problem then human populations may be forced to build underground where it is safe. This would also protect us from solar flares and solar radiation. Building vertical Tunnel habitats straight down instead skyscrapers makes a lot of sense.

For instance there is no way to crash an aircraft into a building, which goes straight down into the ground like the middle eastern Arab international terrorists did in 9/11. Once a vertical Tunnel was built straight down the walls could be fused together using laser molecular realignment technologies. This would make the walls stronger than steel by using the forces of molecular bonding to hold the wall in place while it was being built.

In doing this we would not have to make buildings, which goes straight up and we could connect the walls and the floors of the building laterally into the dirt and therefore it would be much stronger and cheaper to build. People could live in these underground vertical Tunnel habitats and then simply use an elevator to get up to the surface of the planet where they could catch transportation to the rest of the city.

As land and real estate prices get too expensive the buildings get higher and more dangerous. However, if we build downwards we have miles and miles to go before we ever run out to of the earth's crust to build into. Please consider this in 2006.

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