Can a city be too tall? Londoners think so, says new study

[JManc]

Originally Posted by ChargerCarl

You said Paris had no choice but to locate La Defense on the periphery because the ground could not support the weight of skyscrapers. I think thats a dubious claim. As others pointed out, plenty of other skyscraper cities are built on low quality land, i.e Chicago, Shanghai, etc.

Similar claims were made about the concentration of towers in midtown in Manhattan, but they have been debunked:

http://observer.com/2012/01/uncanny-...-of-manhattan/

Are Chicago, Manhattan and Shanghai sitting on medieval era catacombs bored throughout the entire city center? No...

[ChargerCarl]

What makes medieval catacombs a more difficult engineering challenge, one so prohibitively costly that planners had no choice but to ban high rises in central Paris (of course this begs the question of why they felt the need to do this in the first place), than swampland?

[ChargerCarl]

Thats not to say the existence of catacombs don't make a building more costly to build, Im sure they do, but I doubt its very large relative to the land value. The demand to live and work in central paris is so large that any feasible engineering cost can easily be absorbed.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by JManc

Are Chicago, Manhattan and Shanghai sitting on medieval era catacombs bored throughout the entire city center? No...

Neither is most of central Paris.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by ChargerCarl

Thats not to say the existence of catacombs don't make a building more costly to build, Im sure they do, but I doubt its very large relative to the land value. The demand to live and work in central paris is so large that any feasible engineering cost can easily be absorbed.

It's likely that protections would go well beyond structural considerations. You'd simply avoid these areas within a given perimeter.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by ChargerCarl

What makes medieval catacombs a more difficult engineering challenge, one so prohibitively costly that planners had no choice but to ban high rises in central Paris (of course this begs the question of why they felt the need to do this in the first place), than swampland?

Economics? Demand? Skyscrapers really weren't in that demand in Europe until fairly recently at a level seen in the US and in E. Asia. I'm sure there was no economic incentive (I could be very wrong) to engineer around the geology of urban Paris until very recently and now that La Defense is an economic hub, most new development simply goes there.

Had the Montparnasse not been so brutalist and out of sync with the local environment, there may have been more skyscrapers closer in town despite geological limitations.

Catacombs, swampland, bedrock, etc I think it has to do with who settled it and where they established the town center. Downtown Houston is a swamp.

[barney82]

I think Paris went the right route. What seems new and shiny today will seem tacky and played-out in 30 years, and I think modern architecture in general is for whatever reason currently incapable of building the kind of attractive streetscapes which you have from 19th C Paris etc.

If you want a modern, prosperous city, you have to accommodate growth. If that growth is going to be overall unappealing, with the hindsight of history, segregate it away from the legacy good stuff. Don't tear down Soho Manhattan to build some extra highrises, build them in Hudson Yards instead, for example.

[10023]

This is about six months old, but quite interesting and relevant to this thread. The video is worth watching:

http://www.timeout.com/london/blog/t...pproved-021116


Here's the video:

• Video Link


Another video from New London Architecture (one of the guys interviewed in the news story above):

• Video Link