US skyscraper milestone: closing in on 100 towers over 800' tall

[lio45]

“Proposed” AND “Approved”:

https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/sho...d.php?t=251841




(in other words, “at macro-state stage #4 at the moment”)

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by plinko

For point of reference...other cities in the western hemisphere (hopefully I didn't forget any):

Panama City 6
Mexico City 2
Monterrey 1 + 1UC
San Pedro Garza Garcia (Monterrey) 1
Santiago 1

Every one of these was built in the past 20 years.

from yuri's recent thread about brazilian cities, i learned that brazil now has 3 towers over 800' in a city named Balneario Camboriu (which i'd never heard of before).

i guess it's sorta like brazil's version of Benidorn, ie. a relatively small resort city with a disproportionately large beachfront skyline.

2 were just completed this year, and the 3rd is U/C and topped out, and according to the CTBUH they also have some supertalls planned there as well.



so to update your list of western hemisphere 800+ footers outside of the US/canada:

Panama City: 6
Balneario Camboriu: 2 + 1UC
Mexico City: 2
Monterrey: 1 + 1UC
San Pedro Garza Garcia (Monterrey): 1
Santiago: 1

[Crawford]

That's insane. It's a small, provincial city. A beach town for Southern Brazilians.

[WhipperSnapper]

Toronto completed 28, 150 metre towers in the 5 year span from the start of 2017 to the end of 2021. There's 187 planned towers in the database and more added every week. No chance these planned towers will get built in a reasonable amount of time. Highly unlikely all these planned towers will be built in an unlimited amount of time.

There's 38 under construction right now and trending upwards with two already completed this year . Best case is 40 in the next five years (including this year)

[Steely Dan]

the CTBUH is now listing that another two 800+ footers are U/C in NYC:

520 fifth - 1,000'

42-02 Orchard - 811'


so the US is now at 94 800+ footers (quickly closing in on 100!!!), and NYC with 49% of them (46).



here's the updated chart:

[Crawford]

It's amazing that NY barely built any 800 ft.+ towers from the Great Depression until around 2000. There were huge construction booms in the 1950's, 1960's and 1980's, but it seems that towers tended to be wider and shorter than in preceding and subsequent eras.

[Steely Dan]

^ more surprising to me was how NYC almost entirely took a pass on the big tower boom of the '80s.

between 1982 and 1992, 19 towers over 800' were built in cities all across the US, but only one of them was built in NYC (the 814' CitySpire compelted in 1987 and designed by helmut Jahn).

[Phillyguy215]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

the CTBUH is now listing that another two 800+ footers are U/C in NYC:

520 fifth - 1,000'

42-02 Orchard - 811'


so the US is now at 94 800+ footers (quickly closing in on 100!!!), and NYC with 49% of them (46).



here's the updated chart:

Philly really really needs to catch up on the 800”+ boom. Last thing I want to see is a sun belt city surpass us.

[Crawford]

Right. That's just weird. And it isn't like NYC didn't have a 1980's construction boom, it's just that (almost) nothing hit 800 ft. I think NYC built something like 70 million square feet of office space in the 1980's, so there was an avalanche of office construction.

And there wasn't something inherent with market conditions or building styles that precluded 800 ft. towers, bc Chicago had plenty. NYC is of course much more NIMBY and bureaucratic, but it's still weird.

[MAC123]

Well it's certainly making up for that now, and it's looking like in the close future even more.

Penn Station Area is like 11 at least right? (Not counting immediate developments like the Macy's tower that will be over 800' (hopefully it ends up at least 900' so counting the base department store it'll be another supertall)

PABT is like 4

Phase 2 I actually don't known the number there.

Then there is Midtown East with a ton of upcoming projects, not even including UC.

[Crawford]

Right, NYC is making up for it now. I just wish there were more prominent towers from the 1930's through the 1980's*, bc the biggest strength of the NYC skyline is the unmatched representation through the decades.

*Of course 9-11 is the obvious culprit.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Right, NYC is making up for it now. I just wish there were more prominent towers from the 1930's through the 1980's*, bc the biggest strength of the NYC skyline is the unmatched representation through the decades.

*Of course 9-11 is the obvious culprit.

yeah, the loss of the twins was a big hit to NYC's skyscraper tapestry.

not that the 4 big towers that remain from that huge gap between the depression and the 21st century are bad or anything, but the twins were obviously the crowning achievement (in terms of skyline-defining towers) of the city in the latter half of the 20th.

because of their destruction, chicago now easily has the best collection of 2nd half 20th century big towers.

[lio45]

I was looking at a pic of Lower Manhattan with the early 1970s twin towers of the WTC and wow, they are massive. NIMBYs back then must have found it a very extreme transformation.

Freedom Tower is a lot more balanced, skyline-wise.

[MAC123]

Originally Posted by lio45

I was looking at a pic of Lower Manhattan with the early 1970s twin towers of the WTC and wow, they are massive. NIMBYs back then must have found it a very extreme transformation.

Freedom Tower is a lot more balanced, skyline-wise.

Ig but that was a part of their charm. A giant monument to commerce, then becoming a symbol of the city which in turn made it a symbol of the United States.

Unfortunately that also made them a target.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by lio45

I was looking at a pic of Lower Manhattan with the early 1970s twin towers of the WTC and wow, they are massive.

yeah, the twins completely owned the lower manhattan skyline when they first went up back in the '70s.


source: https://simplequietmodern.com/tag/vi...r-photographs/




the sears tower had a similar over-powering presence on chicago's loop back then as well:


source: https://chuckmanchicagonostalgia.wor...anorama-1970s/

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by MAC123

Ig but that was a part of their charm. A giant monument to commerce, then becoming a symbol of the city which in turn made it a symbol of the United States.

Unfortunately that also made them a target.

A publicly funded monument for capitalism lol.

[MAC123]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

A publicly funded monument for capitalism lol.

Uhh yeah??

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by lio45

I was looking at a pic of Lower Manhattan with the early 1970s twin towers of the WTC and wow, they are massive. NIMBYs back then must have found it a very extreme transformation.

My old photography teacher's dad's business was located where the World Trade Center was built. He took a large number of photos of the complex shortly after it was completed, and those photos used to be easily findable on the web but now they've mostly disappeared because he's prepping them for a major museum show sometime around 2024 or 2025.

Here's one low-res blog post that has a few of the photos on it:
https://citizenzoo.wordpress.com/201...-trade-center/

The loss of the towers as a huge architectural loss. It was amazing how the towers were directly inspired by a Japanese rock garden and offset in this really brilliant way but how the primitive tributes to them seemed to mistake them for being side-by-side.

It's like, how do you not notice that they're offset but aligned sort-of like a checker board but not quite?

[Scraperbase.com]

When I counted the skyscrapers around the world, I was also shocked how "dead" the skylines of most cities in the US are. Hardly anything happened. For each skyline in the world I calculated the percentage of skyscrapers over 500 feet that were built since 2000 and since 2012, so in the last decade.

Atlanta for example had only 5.27% of its skyscrapers completed since 2012. That is just one of the 19 skyscrapers. That is an example of a "dead" skyline that pretty much stopped growing long ago. That is the downside of periods with fast skyline growth. At some point the office demand is saturated or even oversaturated. It seems tall apartment towers also never became a thing in Atlanta.

The other extreme of the US is Miami. Almost half of the skyscrapers there were built in the last decade and a staggering 93% of all skyscrapers in Miami where built since 2000. So in some way Miami is booming even more than New York City and Chicago. And that boom will increase a lot in the coming years with all the supertalls that are getting built soon. Miami might soon have four or five supertalls under construction at the same time. That is amazing for a city with less than 500,000 people.

[MAC123]

Miami does not have less than 500,000 people. Its Metro is over 6 million.