How We Rank Skyscrapers is Absurd

I have a beef and I don't just mean a delicious Italian beef sandwich but my beef is that someone decided that both the petronis towers and one World Trade Center are somehow taller than my beloved Sears damn it I mean Willis Tower this upsets me both as an architecture snob and as a Chicago in I mean look at this both of these towers are clearly shorter its pointy things are shorter than the Sears Tower pointy things up here and Sears Tower has two I Willis Tower has two of these pointy things and its roof is clearly higher is it shrinking or something what gives turns out I'm not alone in my outrage just decades too late today in one corner New York's World Trade Center here in New York of course now in the other Corner we have Chicago's Willis Tower which Rises to a height of 1450 ft this was Peak controversy in 1996 and then again in 2010 that's when those substandard monstrosities they dethroned my boxy Beauty First as the world's tallest and then as America's tallest people in Chicago went ballistic both times frankly I don't blame them everyone here knows that our beloved Willis or some may still call it Sear's Tower is the tallest turns out that measuring the height of skyscrapers is just as controversial as declaring the best Italian beef but measuring buildings should be objective that's a matter of opinion but when I look at the relative Heights of these towers and you're telling me that this is the shortest I feel like I'm being gas lit who decides this stuff anyway wait it says right here the CC on tall buildings and urban habitat I know them I just did a video with them about Sky Bridges and they're in Chicago how could they be responsible for this Ridiculousness so I emailed the director of CTB uh I told him to meet me by the river it's a problem that changing criteria resulted in this and this was the first CTB sign board we ever installed around the world it turns out that they set the standards for how we measure the height of buildings how could they have bungled this so hard so how do you determine this order cuz to me it seems obvious that the Sears Tower is taller I allowed Dr Anthony Wood to plead his case this this this building here with the huge is that where's the height of that building I feel like you could have changed the criteria so that Sears Tower could have stayed the king no even in the early days measuring the tallest building wasn't a simple task the first skyscraper usually listed nowadays in hindsight is the Home Insurance building it was built in Chicago in 1885 and it sat right here at the corner of Adams and Clark it was 12 stories tall and measured 55 M or 180 ft from the curb to the top of the facad while we can't confirm its height now because it was demolished we'll have to take people's word for it even so measuring the building wasn't that hard but declaring it the world's tallest skyscraper because it was the first one in 1885 that's not so simple what if I told you that in 1885 New York already had a building that was taller the New York Tribune building was 260 ft or almost 80 M tall and it was built in 1875 so for those of you keeping score at home that is 25 M taller and 10 years earlier than the home insurance building loophole number one that building in New York wasn't technically a skyscraper turns out height alone does not a skyscraper make I mean that sort of makes sense if you think about it the Washington Monument or the Eiffel Tower aren't buildings they're certainly not skyscrapers and they were in fact taller than a lot of the skyscrapers for quite some time but the term skyscraper is reserved for a building that has a frame based structural system so it's not held up by the walls and the facade needs to hang off of that frame system can't hold itself up by gravity alone so the development of the skyscraper came about through a number of things but predominantly the metal frame which the facade then is hung off it in what's known as a curtain wall cuz it's literally like curtain hung from floor to floor rather than load bearing and the home insurance building is the first one to meet that criteria but there's an asterisk here this definition might seem a little arbitrary but that frame and facade solution has been copied ever since and it's what allowed for the explosion of skyscrapers to date so buildings which might have been taller like the one in New York that used older and limited Construction Technologies weren't technically skyscrapers even though the New York Tribune building was taller and it was called a skyscraper at the time I know either way in 1931 the Empire State Building claimed the Undisputed title as world's tallest skyscraper 1,250 ft or 380 M tall as measured from the curb of 34th Street to the tip of its Spire those stats were good enough to hold on to that coveted title for 41 years all was right in the world well not really for the next couple decades people were too distracted to care about what building was the tallest by the 1960s people started to care again and my beloved Sears Tower was squarely part of the zeist the same engineering fever that fueled the Space Race fueled the American desire to create ever taller building in the late 60s these projects were doing the architectural equivalent of walking on the moon right and we were walking on the moon at that time and I think it's an app description I guess Americans just wanted to get as far away from the land of Earth as possible going tall and what it meant was scrutinized at every level there was a complete rethinking of how tall buildings were engineered and of setting the definitions and criteria for how to measure them that's where ctbuh was founded and I think there was a real Pride around the creation of tall buildings and what America was doing creating you know these buildings that were technological like NASA walking on the moon you know it was like doing and they wanted we at the CTB wanted to spread that learning out around the whole world it was a nonprofit to share that knowledge and to set those standards they found that even defining what a tall building is can be difficult it's not objective at all according to them they are buildings that exhibit some element of tallness in one of more of the following categories first it must be relatively higher than its surroundings so a 20-story building here in Chicago wouldn't be considered tall today second it must be taller than it is wide so it's proportion matters and finally a tall building must utilize tall building technology that's the loophole that the home insurance building was a part of but back to that race to get away from Earth which first yielded the world train Center in 1971 then my beloved Sears Tower only a year later there It Is Standing Tall in all of its Glory 1454 ft or 443 M from the curb of Jackson Boulevard to the top of the roof it's so tall that its height was limited only by restrictions set by the federal AV avation administration because otherwise it would interfere with Airline traffic patterns they're always such a buzz kill but Sears Tower was the tallest building in the world and all was right again until that ill- faded Day in 1998 we're now taller than the Sears Tower this is the tallest building in the world the title tallest buildings in the world now belong to quala lumu so 1998 se's Tower loses the title of world's tallest to petronis towers and when you look at these two buildings in silhouette or in section right you will see that Sea's Tower looks a hell of a lot taller than petronis the Pinnacle Point cut yeah the Pinnacle of petronis is about here relative to the two spes of of of seers and for sure there are people working in a permanent capacity up here you know kind of way above where they're working at at the top of petronis sounds like you're making my point but here's the thing the top of petronus is considered a Spire mhm and these two things at the top of world tra of uh seers are considered Antony so let's look at some more examples yeah you see that you know it morphs into this spire at the top yeah you know very famous Hancock Hancock Tower over there the twin antenna you can even see them blinking you know that that is like Sea's tower look at this one so this this this this building here with the huge is that where's the height of that building you know cuz people were emotively reacting and saying well the height of seers is this but would you really say that it's the height of that that antenna there I can see how this is all a little murkier than I originally considered we count Spire an integral part of the vision of the architecture never to be added to never to be taken away we don't count um antenna right even if we look back to the Empire State Building the height of 1250 ft that actually doesn't count the antenna on top if it did it would be considered 1454 ft or taller than the World Trade Center and it gets worse the original World Trade Center had an antenna on it too and that antenna is taller than the Sears Tower antenna ever were so I guess I should be grateful we had a good run to continue to prove how difficult this all is we had to back down to the ground to see how things get even more complicated down at the base of these things you know when it comes to measuring toll Building height it's the tops of the buildings that get all the attention is a Spire is and an antenna but actually the base of the building is just as interesting and just as controversial so criteria used to say the building is measured from the sidewalk outside the front entrance but when you look at this building from across the river or from here you will see that it's actually 40 ft taller okay and if you were on the other side of the river looking at this you would not say that that building is 40 ft shorter just because of that sidewalk the reality is that this whole area that we're on in Chicago is raised ground the ground is down at the level of the Riverwalk more or less and this although it feels like ground it is a raised ground by two stories so we had to change our criteria from saying sidewalk outside the front entrance to height is measured from the level of the lowest pedestrian open air restaurant sorry entrance not restaurant that changing criteria resulted in this and this was the first CTB signboard we ever installed around the world CTB now grants these fancy plaques to buildings recognized for their achievements so for those of you who are still keeping score at home I'll put the important definitions on screen feel free to pause the video to review them more carefully don't forget to read the footnotes height is measured from the level of the lowest significant open air pedestrian entrance of the architecture of top of the building including spires but not including antenna signage flag Poes or other functional technical equipment ironically declaring these titles on plaques shows just how quickly things change while petronus did Dethrone in the Willis Tower in 1996 today neither of them even cracked the top 20 here they are way down at the 19th tallest in the world and the Willis Tower way down here at number 24 there's been an absolute explosion in the construction of tall buildings there are many more towers built annually than ever before and they're much taller more consistently even in the 1990s as this started to happen or or in the earlier period the world the entire world was constructing about 12 buildings above 200 M which is about 660 ft yeah the last decade that was 112 buildings per year so that so it increase by a factor of tenfold wow over the space of two or three decades but you can't discount the bragging rights that goes with having the tallest buildings is an important factor in why developers choose to reach for that title building tall and getting that certification is big business in addition to adding rentable floor area and the revenue for having those tall antenna up there the recognition that goes with completing the tallest structures can be the difference between an anonymous Tower and an icon recognized around the world you get the title of the world's tallest building or any title at all and uh that makes a big difference in terms of almost free promotion of the project building tall is a collective expression of Pride and Ingenuity and and it forms identities the Willis Tower hung on to its other records for dear life as long as it could it was the world's tallest steel building it was also the world's largest building with 418,000 square m of office space it also had the highest occupied floor at 436 M and also the highest to the top of the roof at 442 M today the Willis Tower is none of those things but the legacy of having held those records and the pride that locals still feel for the building it still exists and it's big money too a typical year brings about 1.7 million people to the Sky Deck that adds up to over $30 million per year much of this race and the understanding of the height of buildings has so far been about semantics if you're this far and you're still wondering how we literally measure buildings well we just take the architect's word for it the drawings show the height and that's how it's determined by CTB uh of course measurements are made literally during construction surveyors use trigonometry and vertical viewing agles and use an instrument called a theodoly these are used in conjunction with a total station and can measure things up to 1500 M away or 4,900 ft with an accuracy about 1.5 mm over that distance or two parts per million well I'm so pissed off about this whole Willis Tower thing that it's somehow shorter than petronis or one World Trade Center could we dig an entrance in lower in sirs Tower so that we could uh win win it back and I'm offended that a Chicago organization would give the title from that building to one that appears much shorter it's also mostly just a a vanity metric anyway it's not just about how tall you build it's about how well you build tall or at least that's what I tell myself when I drown my feelings in my next Italian beef sandwich when you give to charity how much impact does your donation actually have this question can be hard if not impossible to answer most Charities can't tell you how your money will be used or how much good it will accomplish you may know that it could theoretically help a cause but how or more importantly how much if you want to help people living in poverty with evidence-backed high impact Charities I recommend that you check out givewell givewell spends over 40,000 hours each year researching charitable organizations and it only directs funding to a few of the highest impact evidence-backed opportunities that they've found over 100,000 donors have used givewell to donate more than $1 billion riger's evidence suggests that these donations will save over 150,000 lives and improve the lives of 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Channel: Stewart Hicks

Views: 473,609

Keywords: architecture, design, architecture student, architecture design, architecture lecture for beginners, architecture 101, architecture documentary, architecture concept, architecture theory, stewart hicks, architecture talk, urban design, chicago, sears tower, willis tower, petronas towers, one world trade cetner, world's tallest skyscraper, architecture course

Id: 9kLx9pXVJlw

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2023