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Originally Posted by 10023
Question for the industry folks - has there been some recent leap forward in technology that makes these tall, narrow residential buildings much easier and cheaper to build?
They seem to have sprouted all over Midtown in a short span of time, and now there are like half a dozen active supertall developments or proposals in Chicago.
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Where do you get half a dozen? There's Vista, One Chicago Square, and Tribune.
The state suggested a supertall for Thompson Center, but there's no developer to actually build it and the state has not moved forward with a sale yet. Even if a supertall ends up being proposed there, it's a whole block - no need to go slender, especially if there is an office component that needs larger floorplates, so that'll be more of a traditional supertall. Obviously there's no public proposal for the Chicago Spire site yet.
To answer your question, engineers routinely share information in conferences and published papers, so the supertalls of Billionaires' Row have paved the way for similar structures elsewhere. Techniques like tuned mass dampers, blow-through floors, ultra-high-PSI concrete, etc have now been refined and a lot of the design risk ironed out.