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World's Tallest Skyscraper Proposed for Houston?


Triton

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... But at this point, we might as well be talking about Captain Janeway vs. the Borg because this proposal sounds more like entertaining science fiction and fantasy than a discussion about architecture.

This IS science fiction. Doubt it is going to happen even with all his billions.

Maybe if you could convince one of the big oil/energy companies to consolidate their offices into this massive tower then that should fill up the entire building. But that would go against their trend of building campuses of smaller buildings.

Is there any significant premium you could charge your tenants in a building like this? I

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There is a premium applied to trophy buildings and also to supertalls and also to new construction. ...but tenant demand thins out at the top of the price structure pretty quickly.

This building would have to be a city unto itself, mixing every conceivable use en masse, to cut its losses.

Yes, like the NYC World Trade Center was. It really was it's own city.

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Yes, like the NYC World Trade Center was. It really was it's own city.

I remember when I went to Chicago and we went to the observation deck of the Sears Tower and they said, on the way up to the top (a one minute ride to the 103 floor) that it had it's own zip and area code. Not to mention it's own water, power, everything you can think of.

An interesting note: The Sears Tower stand at 110 stories. If you put your back against the wall at street level and look up, you can see the top of the tower sway over you and then behind you. How much would a building 3X as tall sway? You'd think it would break in half. The higher you go, the stronger the winds get. Especially during a hurricane where the wind speeds increase astronomically.

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An interesting note: The Sears Tower stand at 110 stories. If you put your back against the wall at street level and look up, you can see the top of the tower sway over you and then behind you. How much would a building 3X as tall sway? You'd think it would break in half. The higher you go, the stronger the winds get. Especially during a hurricane where the wind speeds increase astronomically.

...yes, which goes back to the need for an essentially conical design. With less wind resistance at the top, the sway can be mitigated and the building becomes much more structurally sound. But it also needs a large base, which all but precludes a downtown location.

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I am new so please excuse me if I am repeating something. I thought the FAA limited the Houston skyline to 1,000 ft due to the landing patterns of Hobby Airport. If this is the case there is no way this tower is going downtown.

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whay does emporis have so many buildings that say never built when the companys website says otherwise?

Emporis is slightly less reliable than Wikipedia and slightly more reliable than a bunch of people standing at a bus stop.

Although it presents a nice front of being an upstanding "company" -- it's really just the same yahoos you see running around on SSP. A lot of their information and statistics are incorrect. The majority of the content comes from "volunteers" who could be the owners of huge real estate companies, or 14-year-old kids. I looked into advertising HAIF on Emporis, and after seeing all the inaccuracies and omissions decided the money was better spent elsewhere. Also, their minimum ad buy was $60,000, and HAIF doesn't have that kind of budget. Instead we put a couple thousand into Texas Monthly and Cite.

The only reason Emporis is what it is today is that it jumped on the domain name "skyscrapers.com" early and ended up high in the search engine rankings.

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Additionally you'd need lots of people willing to reside in it (apartments and/or condos)

Althought I disagree with many of your assessments, this one I'm totally with you on. A pure office building would have a VERY hard time at that height. If you look at all of the megastructures being built today, they are all either mixed commercial and residential (Dubai), or all residential (Chicago, Australia, and Dubai again). New York's Freedom Tower is the only one I can think of that's purely commercial.

Very few people in Houston look at a skyscraper as a home. Houston just doesn't have that culture. There are a few, but they're mostly from out of town, and it's going to be a long slow transition before high-rise living becomes mainstream in the Bayou City.

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If it's built in Houston, I say tear down Northwest Mall (it's a useless mall anyways) and built it there. There would be enough room for the huge base it would need (and fake lake, as I learned from Dubai, your tall towers have gotta have a fake lake) and it would be close to uptown and downtown, but not kill those skylines. So you could take pictures of the downtown skyline, uptown skyline, and Freakishly Tall Tower. Just hopefully there wouldn't be too many wrecks at the 290/610 interchange because of people gawking at the thing as they drive by.

Okay, now back to planning that trip to Mars....

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If it's built in Houston, I say tear down Northwest Mall (it's a useless mall anyways) and built it there. There would be enough room for the huge base it would need (and fake lake, as I learned from Dubai, your tall towers have gotta have a fake lake) and it would be close to uptown and downtown, but not kill those skylines. So you could take pictures of the downtown skyline, uptown skyline, and Freakishly Tall Tower. Just hopefully there wouldn't be too many wrecks at the 290/610 interchange because of people gawking at the thing as they drive by.

Okay, now back to planning that trip to Mars....

What about off Allen Parkway? It would "compliment" both the DT skyline and the uptown skyline. There is already several "tall" (I say "tall" compared to this) structures in the area and it would help to connect the uptown skyline with the one DT. Not to mention it's a nice area to live.

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I disagree.

If I was a big time F100 company leasing space in a tower like this, I would be a little anxious of sharing it with residents. The fact that the building is so tall would make it a terrorist risk. So, wouldn

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Guest Marty

Would it be feasible to build a San Jacinto style monument/Obversation tower that tall several miles outside the 610 loop?

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Guest Marty
I think we have the government monitoring this forum now thanks to all the terrorists talk.

The government has been monitoring this forum since its conception and all the other forums about skyscrapers.

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Based on many of the replies in this topic, all I can say is that it's a shame that the pioneering can-do attitude of Texas is dead. Texas is last-century's frontier. The pioneering spirit has been inherited by the Arabs. Then when someone wants to bring it back to the Lone Star State, the city with no zoning starts talking about aesthetics and how it will fit in with the other buildings.

And money? Who cares how it gets financed? If the guy wants to bankrupt his company on his way out, that's his business. You can study any large plan to an early grave. The only people who get anything done, especially these days, are the egos and the visionaries. It's not the accounting firms who build the world's tallest skyscrapers. It's the guys with the bad hair and something to prove.

Glad we're in agreement. I'm sorry, but the "Can-Do" spirit that was as much a Texan characteristic along with cattle, horses, cowboys, oil, and NASA has just about withered away and died. Nowadays, when someone proposes a radical idea, even controversial (Trans-Texas Corridor, Dallas Cowboys stadium, world's tallest building, a subway, and underground freeways in Houston, the Olympics, and so on), the main comments are always "why it won't work" or "what's wrong with it" or something of that vein. It's too bad because the old Texan bravado of "watch us do this no matter what you say" what made other states jealous but to me (as a native non-Texan) was the main draw of the state. I don't care about taxes and cost of living as much. I've lived in other places that were more expensive and would have been used to it. But the Texan can-do spirit and Texan pride ("Don't Mess with Texas"; "It's like a whole other country"; "Deep in the Heart of Texas"; "Everything's Bigger in Texas") is unlike any other state in the Union. There is no other state where you can see the shape of the state on almost everything you can think of--phone book ads, business logos, small-town police departments, rural county logos, restaurant signs, and so on.

Whether or not the building happens, I wouldn't mind if this discussion became more about where the "We can get it done like no other because we're Texans" has gone and whether or not it can it come back.

Despite its faults, Texas is the best state in the US, IMO. Not because of its size (it's #2) or its population (also #2) but because of the Texan pride that still exists at least in perception around the US.

Sorry for the tangential rant!

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Glad we're in agreement. I'm sorry, but the "Can-Do" spirit that was as much a Texan characteristic along with cattle, horses, cowboys, oil, and NASA has just about withered away and died. Nowadays, when someone proposes a radical idea, even controversial (Trans-Texas Corridor, Dallas Cowboys stadium, world's tallest building, a subway, and underground freeways in Houston, the Olympics, and so on), the main comments are always "why it won't work" or "what's wrong with it" or something of that vein. It's too bad because the old Texan bravado of "watch us do this no matter what you say" what made other states jealous but to me (as a native non-Texan) was the main draw of the state. I don't care about taxes and cost of living as much. I've lived in other places that were more expensive and would have been used to it. But the Texan can-do spirit and Texan pride ("Don't Mess with Texas"; "It's like a whole other country"; "Deep in the Heart of Texas"; "Everything's Bigger in Texas") is unlike any other state in the Union. There is no other state where you can see the shape of the state on almost everything you can think of--phone book ads, business logos, small-town police departments, rural county logos, restaurant signs, and so on.

"Watch us not do this no matter what you say" can be an accomplishment in and of itself, you know... That's the kind of attitude that does make Texas something not to be messed with, like its a whole other country, and that does allow people to live out the 'everything is bigger' concept.

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I'm not opposed to someone building a supertall skyscraper here in Houston, but a 3000 ft. straight-up office tower is just ridiculously stupid. Personally, I think if a supertall is built in Houston, they should build one like the proposed Sky City 1000 in Tokyo. It stands 1 km (about 3280 ft) tall, but doesn't look all that ridiculous. However, something like this would would have to stand on its own, outside any of the existing business districts here in Houston. The old Astroworld site would probably work though. Thoughts? Comments?

Skycity1000_01.jpg

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I'm not opposed to someone building a supertall skyscraper here in Houston, but a 3000 ft. straight-up office tower is just ridiculously stupid. Personally, I think if a supertall is built in Houston, they should build one like the proposed Sky City 1000 in Tokyo. It stands 1 km (about 3280 ft) tall, but doesn't look all that ridiculous. However, something like this would would have to stand on its own, outside any of the existing business districts here in Houston. The old Astroworld site would probably work though. Thoughts? Comments?

This approach would on the one hand probably bring per square foot prices to a somewhat more reasonable level, but the very large floorplates would mean that not every unit would have a window to the outside world. ...and that defeats a huge part of the appeal of highrise living. In Tokyo, it may very well fly because conditions are cramped and expensive anyway, but in a place like Houston, if someone is asked to endure all of the cost of highrise living with no discernable benefit to it, then it gets really hard to justify living there over a larger or less expensive home elsewhere. Office could support part of that, but the site would need to be better-located than Astroworld. Not that it'll ever happen in Houston, but Northwest Mall is probably the ideal site for such a development.

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