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Old Posted Mar 24, 2015, 2:45 PM
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Post The Rise of the Mile High Building

Haven't read all of it yet but thought the forum would appreciate...

Quote:
The Rise of the Mile-High Building
By Justin Davidson

If you’ve sat in an airplane’s window seat, you know what the world looks like from a mile up. It’s that point during takeoff and landing when you can pick out an individual car beetling along a highway; when, on a clear day, you can see the city bleed into its suburbs and trace the outline of a mountain range beyond but still find your favorite bocce court if you know where to look. Individual humans are barely detectable from this height, but humanity’s traces ooze to the horizon. In the not unimaginably distant future, this will be the view from someone’s breakfast nook.

The mile-high skyscraper makes a little more sense to build now than it did when Frank Lloyd Wright designed one nearly 60 years ago. Wright imagined, on the fringes of Chicago, a habitable 528-story sundial called the Illinois. That idea wasn’t buildable then; its successor would still be risky, financially ruinous, slow to construct, and inefficient to operate. But that doesn’t mean a mile-high skyscraper won’t get done. “Going big has been a trend ever since the pyramids. It has little to do with practicalities,” says Jay Siegel, an executive and engineer with Allianz, the company that might one day insure this theoretical Hubris Tower. The technology of supertall buildings is a bit like genetic testing or nuclear energy: a volatile form of power. Technological capacities have outpaced our judgment. We know we can do it, but we don’t know when not to do it. And so some endlessly wealthy mogul, most likely in South Asia or a Gulf emirate, will eventually move into a preposterously expensive penthouse so far above the Earth’s crust that the air is thin and gales hammer at the glass. A mile’s not science fiction. It’s not even an outer limit.

...
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...rapers-be.html
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Old Posted Mar 24, 2015, 4:27 PM
Leo the Dog Leo the Dog is offline
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Perfect project for Dubai or any Chinese city.
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Old Posted Mar 24, 2015, 5:28 PM
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The Chinese are too economically rational, actually. It will be some Middle Eastern despot.
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Old Posted Mar 24, 2015, 5:31 PM
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km-high building is already under construction in Jeddah.
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Old Posted Mar 24, 2015, 7:03 PM
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It wasn't the "fringes of Chicago," it was the fringes of downtown Chicago, still very much in the Central area. The site he proposed is now the nexus of the three major interstates that run through Central Chicago and is only about a 10 minute walk from the Sears/Willis Tower.
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Old Posted Mar 24, 2015, 11:15 PM
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all futurist fan boys really want a fully enclosed, anime style vertical neighborhood. has anything close to that ever been built, and orderly. like a legal 30 story city of kowloon???
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Old Posted Jun 3, 2015, 5:50 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by emathias View Post
It wasn't the "fringes of Chicago," it was the fringes of downtown Chicago, still very much in the Central area. The site he proposed is now the nexus of the three major interstates that run through Central Chicago and is only about a 10 minute walk from the Sears/Willis Tower.
You are talking about the Circle Interchange/Jany Byrne Interchange of the Dan Ryan, Kennedy and Eisenhower Expressways I presume. Do you have a source on that being the site for Wright's mile high Illinois? I have heard of numerous sites from different sources such as in or near Lincoln Park and near the Planetarium as in Northerly Island, perhaps because the rendering shows a site that appears to be in a park near the lake and people are just speculating. I am not aware of Wright himself mentioning a specific location for the project.
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