Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

https://books.google.com/books?id=6VnGE ... %9D&f=true

This and the rest of the text doesn't tell us much except that all the prerequisites have been falling into place. But we already know that.

[Higgenbotham]

White districts of New Orleans are well made.

The porch and deck shown below were built by me (I am in both pictures) in my little district for under $1,000 in materials, which I paid for myself. I did all the work myself and had no formal training in building. When I finished, they were well made and so were the rest of the rebuilds.

Oh, yes, I am white.

The 2 photos below show houses I bought with sinking front or back porches for around 12K in both cases. Since the structure was good, the rebuild on the front porch was done with hand tools except for the bolt on post. The stair stringers were cut by hand. The back porch was a tear off and therefore more like new construction with the joists and 4X4s being cut with a Skil Saw due to quantity, plus trimming the decking with a Skil Saw. A power drill was used to drill the bolt holes. All the post holes were dug to 4.5 feet by hand. The front porch was done for about 1/10th the cost of the back deck and half the time while requiring very little in the way of power tools.

The house in the second photo had an old cistern out back that had collapsed, so the back porch was unsalvageable partly for that reason.

[Higgenbotham]

Inverted Priorities
On renewables and the unspoken risk of total grid failure.

DOOMBERG
JAN 2, 2024

Today’s Western economies have come to depend on uninterrupted access to electricity so thoroughly that the prospect of losing power for just a few days would be catastrophic, especially in crowded urban areas. In such cities, a prolonged loss of electricity for weeks or more would rapidly break social order, and one shudders to ponder the carnage that would swiftly follow.

The progressive environmental left’s attempts to completely overhaul the production of electricity have similarly necessitated an aggressive public relations campaign, and the success of its shrewdness has been staggering. When it comes to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, benefits are exclusively covered and grossly overstated, while challenges are hidden by a powerful cloak of propaganda. “Green, clean, and cheap” are repeated ad nauseam throughout our educational, informational, and cultural outlets regardless of the underlying truth of the matter.

The potentially disastrous consequences of these mass manipulation efforts are beginning to materialize. Beyond the well-known issues of intermittency and cost inflation, the proliferation of wind and solar is metastasizing a serious and rarely discussed risk that will eventually be borne by all: The presence of renewables makes our grids far less resilient and far more susceptible to wide-scale blackouts. The trillions of dollars of public money already thrown at this effort provide no protection.

Consider two related near-misses that have occurred in West Texas in recent years. During the late morning hours of May 9, 2021, a routine fault occurred at a traditional power plant near Odessa, Texas. The event caused voltages and frequencies in the local area to dip temporarily. This disruption was, as expected, easily handled by the other traditional plants connected to the grid. The same cannot be said for the connected renewable energy projects, and a total of 1,112 MW of solar and 36 MW of wind electricity were knocked offline.

A little more than a year later on June 4, 2022, a similar but much more serious incident unfolded in the same area, the consequences of which were felt across much of the state. A fault at a power plant caused a cascading series of failures at solar and wind installations in the region, which then triggered a traditional generation facility hundreds of miles away to go offline as well. All told, “the normally cleared single-line-to-ground fault resulted in a total loss of 2,555 MW of generation,” nearly eclipsing the entire responsive reserve service available at the time of the disturbance.

As the penetration of renewable energy grows around the world, grid operators are wringing their hands over the prospect of uncontrolled power losses leading to truly catastrophic events. Although you won’t read about them often in traditional media outlets, numerous similar events across the US have been cataloged by The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), and the organization has flagged concern over potential extended periods of total power loss at the grid level.

How has the forced introduction of renewable power sources increased grid vulnerability? What, if anything, can be done about it, and will such remediations be implemented in time to avoid disaster? Let’s flip on the lights while they still work and learn more.

https://doomberg.substack.com/p/inverted-priorities

[Higgenbotham]

Hopes of a US Nuclear Renaissance Sink With NuScale

The company, a bellwether for the move toward small modular reactors, has foundered on the most familiar of obstacles: time and money. But renewables didn’t do it any favors.

November 10, 2023 at 5:30 AM CST

By Liam Denning


The hoped-for US nuclear renaissance is built on one organizing principle: Shrinking. And that’s exactly what’s happened to the company nominally leading the charge, NuScale Power Corp.

Big nuclear power projects have a habit of blowing through schedules and budgets, in large part because they are bespoke affairs built in the field. The average cost overrun worldwide is 120%, according to a recently published analysis by Bent Flyvberg, a Danish professor and expert on megaprojects. But with 60% of US grid power still coming from fossil fuels, and climate change bearing down on us, nuclear power’s zero-emissions energy is touted as a necessity.

Enter small modular reactors, or SMRs, which are supposed to reduce costs by building them in series, like anything made in a factory. A clutch of companies are racing to develop them, including several in the US. NuScale is the first, and only, one to have its reactor design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The company struck a deal to build a 462 megawatt facility in Idaho. That deal just got canceled.

The project had not secured enough buyers of its planned output to continue. It isn’t too hard to see why. In January, its estimated cost of power jumped by 53% to $89 per megawatt-hour. That came just after a year in which the 10-year Treasury yield surged by about 230 basis points. Its up roughly another 80 basis points since then — one reason offshore wind, another nascent sector, is also suddenly struggling. It’s safe to say a revised cost estimate, maybe running to three figures, probably wasn’t too far off. Plus, let’s not forget, no one’s deployed a commercial SMR in the US before, so all these numbers are conjecture anyway.

The potential buyers of the NuScale’s project’s output, 50 municipal power providers scattered across several western states, ultimately couldn’t stomach the risk. Their confidence couldn’t have been bolstered by a history of changing plans and timelines — similar to what’s been seen elsewhere in the nuclear power industry. NuScale was originally supposed to have a 12-reactor project up and running for Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, a state agency providing energy services, by 2023. That eventually became a six-reactor design set to begin operations in 2029.

To be clear, it would be weird if a startup developing new energy hardware — especially reactors — didn’t change plans and cost estimates. Nonetheless, it means this particular attempt to break the mold for nuclear power foundered on the most familiar of obstacles: time and money.

There’s another, related problem lurking here that must be addressed by all SMR developers.

While the end of the original wave of US nuclear power development is usually blamed on the Three Mile Island disaster, the real problem was that the world changed, with the promising energy supply and demand dynamics of the 1960s giving way to something less conducive to giant, expensive power plants that take a decade or more to build (see this).

Today, even SMRs face this same problem in the form of rising penetration of renewable power and batteries, which have mostly fallen in price. UAMPS’s enthusiasm for the NuScale project stemmed from its desire to get off coal-fired power, part of an accelerating decarbonization of the grid in western states. Between 2017 and 2021, a net 23 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity was added to the Western Interconnection, whose grids cover 13 states and provinces in the US and Canada. Even that is dwarfed by what’s coming.

Renewables, with effectively zero marginal running costs (they burn no fuel), squeeze down the number of hours in the day when traditional, dispatchable power plants are needed. In some markets, solar power can already meet all demand in the middle of some sunny days.

This creates a particular problem for nuclear power because its high costs demand that any plant be run as much as possible. The NuScale project’s cost estimates assumed it would run 96% of the time, according to UAMPS. But that wouldn’t be needed in a grid dominated by renewables, especially those twinned with batteries that extend their reach further into the night or periods of listless wind. Experience to date in markets where renewables have taken off, such as California and Texas, suggests more of the value in dispatchable power now lies in flexibility: The ability to quickly ramp power up and down as intermittent renewables do their thing. Natural gas-fired plants are particularly well suited to this — at least until batteries are deployed at massive scale — which is why Texas is now effectively offering taxpayer funds to build or modernize them (even if its particular approach leaves much to be desired).

Nuclear power plants, of any size, are not well-suited to this kind of grid. If power is already estimated to cost $89 per megawatt-hour at 96% utilization, it’s a safe bet it would be astronomical at lower usage.

There are potential ways to finesse this. Chris Gadomski, Bloomberg NEF’s nuclear guru, points to TerraPower LLC, the Bill Gates-backed startup developing a more advanced type of SMR than NuScale’s that would add molten salt-based energy storage. In that sense, it would borrow from the renewables sector’s strategy of backing up intermittent wind and solar with batteries. In this case, though, it should give the SMR the option to respond to higher power prices — like when the sun goes down and solar plants switch off — by releasing energy from storage rather than ramping the reactor up itself. Similarly, it’s possible that SMRs could be dedicated to energy intensive industrial applications like producing hydrogen or desalinating water, switching their output to the wider grid when electricity prices are favorable — nuclear power twinned with demand management, in other words.

These are interesting possibilities, to be sure, though perhaps not the renaissance nuclear power’s most ardent fans desire. As renewable energy sources eat up more of the grid, though, startups wanting to avoid NuScale’s fate will have to embrace them.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... th-nuscale

[Higgenbotham]

Whoops.

Twin Towers Engineered To Withstand Jet Collision

Feb 27, 1993

Eric Nalder

Engineers had to consider every peril they could imagine when they designed the World Trade Center three decades ago because, at the time, the twin towers were of unprecedented size for structures made of steel and glass.

"We looked at every possible thing we could think of that could happen to the buildings, even to the extent of an airplane hitting the side," said John Skilling, head structural engineer. "However, back in those days people didn't think about terrorists very much."

Skilling, based in Seattle, is among the world's top structural engineers. He is responsible for much of Seattle's downtown skyline and for several of the world's tallest structures, including the Trade Center.

Concerned because of a case where an airplane hit the Empire State Building, Skilling's people did an analysis that showed the towers would withstand the impact of a Boeing 707.

"Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed," he said. "The building structure would still be there."

Skilling - a recognized expert in tall buildings - doesn't think a single 200-pound car bomb would topple or do major structural damage to a Trade Center tower. The supporting columns are closely spaced and even if several were disabled, the others would carry the load.

"However," he added, "I'm not saying that properly applied explosives - shaped explosives - of that magnitude could not do a tremendous amount of damage."

He took note of the fact that smoke and fire spread throughout the building yesterday. He said that is possibly because the pressurizing system that stops the spread of smoke didn't work when the electric power went off. Skilling, 72, was not involved in the design of the building mechanics.

Although Skilling is not an explosives expert, he says there are people who do know enough about building demolition to bring a structure like the Trade Center down.

"I would imagine that if you took the top expert in that type of work and gave him the assignment of bringing these buildings down with explosives, I would bet that he could do it."

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archiv ... ug=1687698

This was probably written after a bomb was smuggled into the basement of the WTC in a van and detonated in 1993.

[Higgenbotham]

A Reporter at Large
The Tower Builder

By John Seabrook

November 11, 2001

“I have a lot of tough nights,” Leslie E. Robertson, who helped design the World Trader Center, said.

Photograph by Alen MacWeeney

Structural engineers make buildings stand up, but the public doesn’t pay much attention to what they do until a building falls down. Although the safety of a building’s occupants depends on its structure, most people notice only the aesthetics, the furnishings, and the view, and give the architects, not the engineers, all the credit (or blame) for the results. Very few inhabitants of modern high-rises know where the load-bearing columns are placed, and how they are supported, or whether the building is a frame structure or a tube structure, and almost no one checks above the ceiling tiles to see how the floor overhead is attached to the vertical supports—all decisions that are worked out by the building’s structural engineers. The anonymity of the high-rise structural engineer is the reward for his genius. Part of the awe that skyscrapers command lies in their apparent freedom from gravity: they’re not just tall; they’re effortlessly tall.

Since the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, on September 11th, structural engineers and their profession have received a great deal of public attention. University engineering departments around the country have been staging public forums in which the “mechanics of failure” are debated; there’s one at Columbia University this week. The American Society of Civil Engineers and fema (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) are funding a team of twenty-four civil and fire-safety engineers to investigate what parts of the Twin Towers’ structure failed first, and how much damage was caused by the impact and blast of the airplanes, and how much by the ensuing fires. Dr. W. Gene Corley, a structural engineer with Construction Technology Laboratories, in Skokie, Illinois, who led fema’s investigation into the collapse of the nine-story Murrah Building, in Oklahoma City in 1995, is the over-all director of fema’s inquiry into the World Trade towers. In addition to inspecting the site of the disaster, he told me, his team will review photographs and enhanced videos of the collapse, examine the debris, and use information from firemen, policemen, survivors, and other witnesses in an attempt to reconstruct the moment at which each structure failed.

Of course, you don’t need an engineer to tell you why the towers fell down: two Boeing 767s, travelling at hundreds of miles an hour, and carrying more than ten thousand gallons of jet fuel each (if you converted the energy in the Oklahoma City bomb into jet fuel, it would amount to only fifty-one gallons), crashed into the north and south buildings at 8:45 a.m. and 9:06 a.m., respectively, causing them to fall—the south tower at 9:59 a.m. and the north tower at ten-twenty-eight. Nor do we need a government panel to tell us that the best way to protect tall buildings is to keep airplanes out of them. Nevertheless, there is considerable debate among experts about precisely what order of events precipitated the collapse of each building, and whether the order was the same in both towers. Did the connections between the floors and the columns give way first or did the vertical supports that remained after the impact lose strength in the fire, and, if so, did the exterior columns or the core columns give way first? “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” said Ron Hamburger, a structural engineer with ABS Consulting, in Oakland, California, who is also on fema’s team, when I asked which of these scenarios he favored. Although there may never be another event like the attack on the towers, the disaster also highlights several potential weaknesses in the way that many modern high-rises are constructed—weaknesses that the designers of the tall buildings of the future may want to consider.

Leslie E. Robertson is the engineer who, with his then partner, John Skilling, was mainly responsible for the structure of the Twin Towers. Unlike most of his colleagues, who have been widely quoted and interviewed, he has remained largely out of the public eye since September 11th. His only public appearance was at a previously scheduled meeting of the National Council of Structural Engineers Associations, on October 5th, in New Hampshire, where, as the Wall Street Journal reported, on being asked by an engineer in the audience, “Is there anything you wish you had done differently in the design of the building?,” Robertson broke down and wept at the lectern. Guy Nordenson, a structural engineer in New York and a professor at Princeton, who, like many of his colleagues, regards Robertson with great respect, showed me a recent E-mail he had received from him. It was a response to a letter Nordenson had written to the Times, praising the towers’ structural design for keeping them standing as long as they did, and allowing some twenty-five thousand people to escape. “It’s very Les,” he said, referring to Robertson, and pointed at his computer screen. “Almost Shakespearean.” Robertson had written:

Your words do much to abate the fire that writhes inside
It is hard
But that I had done a bit more . . .
Had the towers stood up for just one minute longer . . .
It is hard.

On a brilliantly sunny fall morning in late October, I visited Robertson’s offices, on the top two floors of 30 Broad Street, a forty-eight-story building that stands a few blocks from Ground Zero. From the windows of the conference room where I waited for Robertson, there was a clear view down into the rubble where the south tower once stood. Fires were still burning inside the pit, and the smell, that sweet acrid odor of burning metal and decay, was noticeable in the room. Many of the firm’s sixty employees, including Saw-Teen See, Robertson’s wife, who is also a partner in the firm, stood by these windows and watched as the second plane flew in over Hudson River Park, banked, and disappeared inside the south tower. See remembers closing her eyes at that moment, and didn’t see the fireball come out the other side.

I turned away from the view and studied pictures of other buildings that Robertson’s firm had worked on over the years, which were displayed around the room, including the Bank of China Tower, in Hong Kong, a twelve-hundred-and-nine-foot structure engineered by Robertson for I. M. Pei. Pei’s characteristic triangular shapes had been seamlessly translated into gigantic diagonal braces on the sides of the building. Structural engineers commonly complain that architects don’t understand how to construct high-rise buildings, from either a structural or an economic perspective, leaving it to the engineers to wrestle with the problems posed by the architecture and to resolve them in a way that allows the potential contractor to submit a bid for the project that is within the developer’s budget. Such a perfect marriage of architecture and structure as the Bank of China Tower is unusual in the creation of skyscrapers, but it is a distinguishing feature of many of the buildings that Robertson has worked on over the years, and especially the World Trade towers.

On entering the room, Robertson walked over and looked out the window at the smoking pile where his structures had once been. He seemed to do this casually, but as we stood there I noticed that he was trembling slightly. He remained before the window for almost a minute, with the air of a man forcing himself to confront something he didn’t want to confront, nodding as though to say, O.K., this is reality, I know it—but looking bewildered at the same time. When we sat down, he said, “The World Trade Center was a team effort, but the collapse of the World Trade Center is my responsibility, and that’s the way I feel about it.”

Robertson, who is seventy-three, wore a gray silk shirt that was open at the collar. His hair is mostly white, and longish, falling over his ears, and with bangs in front, which gives him a slightly bohemian look. His brown eyes are like very deep pools, and the flesh below the eyes was swollen, either with fatigue or with grief. As we talked, he frequently looked out the window. I felt the absence of the buildings in him. “That’s how people introduced me,” he said. “I was the designer of the World Trade Center. Although that was wrong, actually—I only assisted on the team that designed it. But that’s who I was.”

Robertson was in Hong Kong on September 11th, having dinner with the developers of a skyscraper that will be built in Kowloon. “A woman’s cell phone rang, and she said an airplane had hit the World Trade towers. I thought it was an accident, one of the helicopters that were always flying overhead. A short time later, my wife called me and said the second plane had hit, and I went upstairs and turned on the television. I knew both buildings were hit by planes, both on fire. I had no idea whether there were a thousand people or fifty thousand people at risk. I knew the fire was burning out of control, I knew people were jumping to get away from the heat . . .” His eyes searched the empty view again.

“Before the buildings collapsed,” I asked, “did any part of your brain, calculating, say, ‘There’s probably this amount of jet fuel, this amount of fire protection—the building has this long to last’?”

“I can’t . . . I think there are times when logic just isn’t the right way to think.” Robertson’s eyes were filling with tears. “This all took place in an hour and a half. The TV was on. I don’t know if what I saw was the buildings falling down on rerun or whether it was live. I was just focussed on getting back to New York City. I remember packing my bags. And when the building collapsed—it was totally devastating.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001 ... er-attacks

[Higgenbotham]

The replacement tower near the Twin Towers was built to withstand collision.

The Twin Towers were built to withstand collision too, but they weren't able to withstand it.

The question in my mind, though, is whether the building of the Twin Towers was another example of overreach. When contemplating the construction of the Twin Towers, it's not apparent to me that the questions that probably should have been asked were asked. It's not just a matter of can this civilization build a building that is X feet tall where X is a very large number. It's a question of whether this civilization should build a building that is X feet tall. The answer this civilization seems to have to such questions is not to consider them but to default to overreach without considering whether it is wise to do so or not.

Also, in our everyday conversations both public and private, there are constant references to those who are “smart” but somewhere between zero and a very small number of references to people who are “wise”. Therefore, it’s not possible to point to a group of wise people who have been identified by some tried and true process and know what that group thinks about the Federal Reserve, or anything else. The problem if the wise were to somehow get control of decision making at this time is that the position industrial civilization currently finds itself in is not a good one for the wise to grapple with. People with wisdom are good at keeping a civilization on the correct path but not so good at knowing what to do with it once it has deviated from that path for a long time. An example of that might be the question of whether the world should have gone down the path of R&D and manufacturing of synthetic chemicals. The wise probably would have determined not go down that path, but in this industrial civilization they weren’t in any position of authority to determine whether that was going to be done; the intelligent (at the approximate level of the 97th Percentile, but not the highest level) were. Now that we have gone down that path, the wise probably can’t help us. Similarly, now that the Federal Reserve boondoggle has been going on for a long time, assuming abolishing the Fed is a wise choice, the wise can’t help much with that either. However, there are “primitive” civilizations that do have processes to assess and identify individuals who have wisdom and put them into positions of responsibility and authority. Those are the villages and their elders. If the large and highly centralized governments in this industrial civilization were to collapse, followed by important decision-making being made at the town level, I believe there would be improvement in the quality of decisions being made. Probably not uniformly, but at a minimum in isolated pockets, and those pockets of good decision-making will be the areas that will prosper and become models for other places to follow as they try to regain their footing.

It might be that it was some form of overreach, that the Romans weren't focusing on protecting the core of their civilization and were instead getting too far ahead of themselves with technologies that were draining resources away from the core. I suspect that's the case.

Demarest off the cuff.

https://www.arthurdemarest.com/collapse ... s-today-2/

"You know what's going to bring our civilization down?...the byproducts of our incredible technology, our wonderfully successful capitalist economic system, our tremendous linking through communications and information systems, and the spread of democracy. That's what's gonna bring us down. The combination of all those things has caused a real boom which will lead to a giant, giant bust."

"So, you know, we're collapsing. But I'm not just a grumpy old man, we're collapsing. Although it sounds like it. I'm an expert on the collapse of 18 civilizations and we're collapsing. We've got everything. We've got every single fucking cause of collapse you could want except radical climate change and that's beginning. So, but as I've told you, don't worry about global warming. We won't make it far enough for that to be a problem. I think the wars are going to be the end of everything but only because the infrastructure's so vulnerable because of hypercoherence and technology it's also fragile."

I think at the apex of a civilization the evidence of overreach extends far and wide, beyond just the commonly used term "imperial overreach".
Demarest doesn't make it totally clear what he means by "You know what's going to bring our civilization down?...the byproducts of our incredible technology" but it seems pretty clear in this quote and others that he is referring more to overreach than some other byproduct such as a technological accident.

I previously summarized another of Demarest's apparent references to overreach:

Updated link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/20 ... o-collapse

Status rivalry drives leaders to try to establish something great, which appears to compensate for the decline. We get these periods that look amazing but they're actually a phenomenon of decline. Things look better and better but actually are getting more and more fragile.

The evidence of overreach I've most frequently referred to is Bernanke's (and now his successors) wild money printing and backstopping, which has exceeded anything done since the events leading up to the fall of the Bardi or maybe even anything in all of history.

Overreach extends into everyday life too, encompassing almost all of it, in my opinion.

The example that stands out in my mind was about 15 years ago I got up early to go running and decided to go to the local high school track, thinking nobody could possibly be there yet. When I got there, perhaps about 6:20 a.m., it was still dark but the parking lot was lit up and buzzing with activity. The marching band was practicing.

I don't believe overscheduling kids in this manner will lead to better outcomes. More likely it will lead to burnout, or maybe it already has.



https://www.ksjbam.com/2022/02/23/state ... ugh-sleep/

[Bob Butler]

The example that stands out in my mind was about 15 years ago I got up early to go running and decided to go to the local high school track, thinking nobody could possibly be there yet. When I got there, perhaps about 6:20 a.m., it was still dark but the parking lot was lit up and buzzing with activity. The marching band was practicing.

I don't believe overscheduling kids in this manner will lead to better outcomes. More likely it will lead to burnout, or maybe it already has.

I sympathize on the overreach, but am also a band brat way back. How many football fields were available, and did the football team think they had priority? The band director may have been stuck.

Congratulations on the move, I think.

[Higgenbotham]

Yes, the show will go on. The points for extracurriculars are needed for the upcoming college application submittals and no parent or otherwise will raise objections to the band director jumping over hoops to get it all done. The band director in fact will likely be lauded.

If someone were to stand outside a potato chip processing plant, especially in the winter, two of the more obvious things would be the 4 inch natural gas pipe going into the plant and the steam billowing out of the plant. Someone noticing that may be vaguely aware that their observation relates to lots of carbon dioxide production. It's very unlikely in my opinion that any of the rare individuals who would drive by such a plant and realizing all of that would curtail their consumption of potato chips, especially if chips are on offer at, let's say, the end of the next 6 am band practice before it is time to scurry off to the first class.

[Higgenbotham]

The question in my mind, though, is whether the building of the Twin Towers was another example of overreach. When contemplating the construction of the Twin Towers, it's not apparent to me that the questions that probably should have been asked were asked. It's not just a matter of can this civilization build a building that is X feet tall where X is a very large number. It's a question of whether this civilization should build a building that is X feet tall. The answer this civilization seems to have to such questions is not to consider them but to default to overreach without considering whether it is wise to do so or not.

The Economics of Skyscraper Height (Part I)

Jason M. Barr December 17, 2018

Note this is Part I of a series on the economics of skyscrapers. The rest of the series can be read here.

Clark and Kingston

In 1930, W. C. Clark and J. L. Kingston (CK), an economist and architect, respectively, published a book called, The Skyscraper: A Study in the Economic Height of a Modern Office Buildings. In this work, they act as a hypothetical developer of a Manhattan office skyscraper. Their aim was to determine a height for the structure which maximized the return, given the rents, and the costs of land and construction.

In fined-grained detail, they laid out the various elements of erecting such a building, including floor plans, and the all the different types of costs a builder must pay, from bricks, to elevators, to steel. For their analysis, they chose a large lot across the street from Grand Central Station, in the heart of Manhattan’s midtown business district.

The point of this exercise was to demonstrate that the supertall towers rising in Manhattan during the late 1920s were not “freak” buildings, but rather, were based on reasonable economic foundations.[1] They showed that when one did all of the accounting—comparing the income to the costs—the height that maximized the return was 63 stories. (Ironically, this is not that much different than today. One Vanderbilt, an office building currently under construction across the street from Clark and Kingston’s hypothetical lot, will rise 58 stories.)

Economic Height

In their book, they present a definition of what they called the Economic Height of the building, based on the writings of the engineer, J. Rowland Bibbins; and one that is still reasonable:

The true economic height of a structure is that height which will secure the maximum ultimate return on total investment (including land) within the reasonable useful life of the structure under appropriate conditions of architectural design, efficiency of layout, light and air, ‘neighborly conduct’, street approaches and utility services. (pps. 8-9)

Economic Height provides a useful guide (though not the only one) for understanding why skyscrapers get built, since this height is determined by the best balance between the revenues and costs. In general, going taller will generate more income, but will also add to the expense. In modern economics terminology, the economic, or profit maximizing, height is one where at the highest floor, the additional or marginal revenue from that floor just equals the marginal or additional cost to providing it. If built one floor higher, the cost of adding the floor will be greater than the revenue and will not be worth it. If less than that height, money is “left on the table,” since adding a floor would produce more income than it would cost to produce it.

It’s worth stressing is that a developer builds this optimal height to earn a profit. People and companies are willing to pay the high prices because of the needs they fulfill and the benefits they provide. Thus, Economic Height is a response to the demand; not the other way around.

According to the CTBUH, there were 4,162 skyscrapers built between 1960 and 2017. It turns out that the vast majority of tall buildings are less than 200 meters (68.3%). Only 23 are 400 meters or taller. Statistically speaking if you were to randomly pick a skyscraper constructed since 1960, the probability that you would select a building greater than 400 meters is about one-half of one percent. The vast majority of buildings are “regular-talls” (under 50 stories); while the number of “super-talls” is minuscule, in comparison. The super-giants, while most visible from media accounts and their appearances in skylines, only make up a tiny, tiny fraction of the world’s skyscrapers.

Skyscraper Heights Histogram. Each blue bar shows the fraction of skyscrapers (≥150 meters) around the world in that height category (completed between 1960 – 2017). For example, 68% of all skyscrapers are less than 200 meters. The orange line is the fraction in a category or lower. 99% of the world’s skyscrapers are less than 350 meters. Source: CTBUH.

The Drivers of Economic Height

The evidence suggests that the bulk of the world’s skyscrapers are consistent with the notion of Economic Height. This is not to say that all skyscrapers reflect the best balance between the costs and benefits, but it is to say that the majority of the world’s skyscrapers have a strong economic rational, in that they are catering to a demand for building height.

Are Megatall Buildings Good or Bad?

But what about the megatall giants like the Burj Khalifa, the Shanghai Tower, or the Taipei 101? They must be wasteful projects, with little economic rational, right? I would argue that the answer is not so clear, and that maybe we should not be so hasty to judge. Stay tuned.

Continue reading. The rest of the series can be read here.

https://buildingtheskyline.org/skyscraper-height-i/