Skyscrapers and Vertical Cities: Part Two

part episode. When we were in the studio talking about the future of tall buildings and skyscrapers and vertical civilization, we we got so into the topic that we ended up going very long, so we decided to split it into for you all. So so, uh, it's not to overburden your ears. It's easily digestible chunks. Yes, So if you didn't listen to part one, go ahead and go

do that and we'll meet you back right here. And now we're gonna talk all about some engineering, incredible feats and science fiction ideas and uh, probably some stuff about lad Yes. So yeah, as long as you have caught up on the first episode, please continue with what we're about to say right now. One of the things that occurred to me when I was first researching this topic is that when you think about it from my perspective, I wonder what you guys think about this. A super

tall building isn't just a building. Like when you think about a building, it's mostly pretty static. I mean, depending on how many you might have utilities coming into a home or something like that. But if it's it's not just like building a very very large shed. Building a skyscraper is more like building a gigantic machine with many moving parts and functional difficulties you have to face and manage. Yeah, the taller building gets, the more engineering challenges you're going

to face. Yeah, And so I wanted to start with one example that's sort of, uh, one of the frontiers of future super tall building design. Water distribution. Right, So, how do you get water to the toilets and the taps and the days and the recreational pressure washing machines on the top floor of a building you're not aware of the league's never mind. Well, to get to get water up to the top of a really tall building,

you have to pump it. I mean, you can't just rely on on pressure from a water tower or something like that. If you're going up above where a water tower would be, Uh, you have to pump the water out. But the taller you're building is the more difficult, the more costs, the more time intensive it is to get the water from ground level up to the top of the building. So how do you get around this problem? Well, you know, we already talked about one in in the

in terms of the Shanghai Tower collecting rainwater. Yeah, that's an oldie but a goodie, and depending on what's in your rainwater, you might only be able to use it for certain purposes like the gray water uses that Lauren was talking about, right, But another proposal that will get to later on is the sky Mile tower in Future Tokyo. I want to talk about this towards the end of the episode. It's it's really, I think more of an idea than a than a real building proposal, but it

suggests an interesting solution, which is cloud harvesting. Have you ever heard about this? Uh? No, I hadn't heard about it before, but it does sort of make sense the idea. It's almost like creating a a surface of condensation so that you can collect the water moisture that's already in the air exactly. Yeah, So it's a method of using specialized materials to harvest water vapor from the air itself.

And one standard example, the one you might have read about before, isn't so much used in buildings, but it's just a standalone collector you might use where it's something like a big piece of mesh fabric that's specially designed in such a way that when it catches the wind water vapor in the air, condenses in the fabric and then drips down into the bottom of the fabric and eventually collects in a receptacle. Have you actually seen I mean, I've been seeing it on Facebook all over the place.

I think it might even be a Kickstarter campaign, but it's it's a amping. It's it's meant to go be a thing that you take camping with you, and it's essentially some sort of of like almost like a mug, but it's designed to pull moisture from the air, condensed down and fill up so that you have drinking water right there and you just leave it out. And it's supposed to pull humidity from the air and condense that

into water. I have not looked into it further to make sure that it uh makes sense, but I mean the basic principles definitely makes sense. Whether that particular product works the way advertised, I don't know. In principle, this is not like an if thing. You you can use materials to collect water vapor from the air. That's a proven concept. I don't know about the scale issues of applying that to the water needs of a occupants skyscraper. It goes a mile into the sky, as the sky

mile tower will propose. And again I'm going to mention that in a bit, but but it's a cool idea

in general. I guess the way the would apply to a skyscraper would mean something about putting the special materials and drainage systems on the outside facade of the building, although at that point you might need to start getting back to terriffence our our climate episodes again into at least being aware of what that kind of moisture collection is going to do to your weather patterns around the city and whether or not it's going to have a

detrimental effect. Yeah, it's kind of hard to imagine without having built it first. Yeah, but there are other big challenges, and one of them we've already kind of alluded to you You mentioned like the idea of traffic flow in these large buildings, but beyond traffic flow, just creating elevators that work in these environments is incredibly challenging. Yeah. Just try to imagine taking a normal elevator up one hundred floors to your office in the morning. Yeah. Well yeah.

The thing. The thing is, guys, is that if you're going to have an elevator pull you a couple hundred stories up into the sky, it's going to need some really serious muscle. And I've got some statistics from a really great piece that was in Scientific American in by one Larry green Meyer, and he was talking about the elevators in the one World Trade Center, which is the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere at one thousand, seven

hundred and seventy six ft sev seventy six. Get it, sit down, John, see what they did there, um which is five forty one and it has seventy one elevators that are driven by eight electric motors weighing two point three tons apiece, which used five hundred tons of counterweights. Yeah, so you're talking, you know, you have to use these massive counterweights in order to uh to get these elevators

to work the way they were intended to work. And also, Joe, you were pointing out before we even started to go into the studio for the video piece that ultimately it's not just the elevator that you have to worry about or the weight, but the physical cable as well. Yeah. I mean, as the cable keeps getting longer, So what what they would typically use in a system like this is steel wound rope and then a counterweight and a

pulley system. And yeah, so once you get hundreds and hundreds of feet of steel cable, that really starts adding up in weight in itself. Yeah. Yeah, And and just in terms of the tentsile strength that you need in the materials science involved in that kind of equation. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's kind of like we we talked about this

with our Space Elevators episode two. The idea that as as you get longer, the weight gets gets greater, which means the strength needs to be greater in order to handle the way the thickness needs to be greater, which it just it just becomes like once you hit a certain tipping point, you realize this is no longer practical, right. But another thing that I think is important to consider with the elevators is that they're not just for moving

cargo or something. Yeah. There, there's there's delicate human people, uh shoved shoved up in these things. Yeah. It kind of reminds me of some of the often overlooked limitations on aircraft and spacecraft design. Rapid acceleration is great on a crued spacecraft, unless it's so rapid that it renders unconscious or kills the passengers, generally considered to be a bad thing trowned upon in most offices. Now, I doubt we're going to have an elevator that would kill you,

but there could be elevators that would be really unpleasant. Sure, I'm reminded of of like space Mountain, like the amount of jostle that you get on a on an old roller coaster. Okay, So to to get elevators to move both quickly and smoothly, the rail systems that guide them

need to be as frictionless as they possibly can. But since elevators are moving vertically, their rails have to come in these short chunks that are going to support the structure, meaning that you need a lot of rail joints to connect all of them, um which are bumpier than just

a stretch of rail rights you can probably understand. You also then have to account for stuff like the building's potential temperature changes and sway, as we were talking about in Shanghai Tower, and you just wind up needing to engineer all kinds of materials and systems that help absorb shocks and and kind of smooth the ride out so that you're not rattling people's teeth. I would imagine that with all those joints. Yeah, like you're saying, the temperature changes.

If if one section is slightly warmer than the other, it may expand a bit, which means that you have created a bit of a jostling sensation as the elevator passes that that joint of track sway. As you point out again, anything that could push these rails out of alignment could cause some, if if not dangerous, at least

uncomfortable side effects. Certainly, you also have to deal with air pressure, and not just in the cabin like we were talking about your your ears popping in that kind of internal discomfort, but also in the shaft of the elevator, because pulling an elevator car around means that you're also shing around a lot of air and creating a higher air pressure in the direction that the cab is moving

and a lower air pressure behind it. So that means it, okay, like if an elevator is moving up, the resulting air pressure could blow out the doors on the floor on the floor above it and suck in the doors on the floor below it, right, So yeah, I just I just imagine, like if they have not thought about this with these super tall buildings, all I can imagine is going through the front door, walking toward the desk, and then immediately getting blown out the building because all the

elevators are coming down to the ground floor, pushing all that air out into the lobby, and then you just shoot out like a bullet. Uh. So yeah, that's clearly something that you have to have some way to vent that air in a in a way that's going to be safe well, or just to just to mitigate it through aerodynamic controls on the elevator cab itself, on the outside of the cab. Um And yeah, a shaft design

at that point becomes very importan um uh computer programming. Hey, if you guys have ever waited for elevators, let's say, a busy hotel or a convention center. You know how tough it is for even very good computers to handle large numbers of requests in multi elevator banks, largely due to the fact that some jerk faces will hit both the up and the down button no matter which direction they need to go, because they figure again in the first one that gets there. Don't do that, No, never

do that. Just the worst. If you need to go up, just press the up button. Just press the up button, because then the computer system can handle it and you'll get there faster. Trust me, Yes, don't confuse computers. It's impolite. See you with dragon con Uh. I just use a personal gyrocopter and I'm great. Balcony to balcony, baby, go

go gadget copter. There you go. But yeah, there's there's also another consideration with these super tall buildings and elevators, a very important one, which is what happens if something were to go catastrophically wrong and you need to evacuate the building. Uh? Yeah, you know how like most elevator lobbies have those signs warning that, you know, in case of a fire or whatever, you should use the stairs. Uh. In super tall buildings, people would not physically be able

to exit fast enough via stairs. So these types of elevators need to need to be able to keep working in the case of an emergency, and also need to be programmed to take people to like designated rescue floors, which is hypothetically the quicker, easier way to get people out in in an emergency. Right And in other words, you won't don't have to worry about having to go down a hundred and twenty flights of stairs. Yes, that

sounds like a bad day, you know that. That sounds like, Yeah, that sounds like there's gonna be a horrible outcome no matter what. So yeah, you have to think about that. That's it's actually one of the big challenges that I listed when we were thinking about pros and cons and uh and I'm glad that you addressed it here because it's it's are the ones that merely jumped out at me other future technologies that people are considering in in terms of because because all of these are are pretty

much expansions of typical elevator technologies and stands today. But but people are forward thinking indeed, And uh so, okay, so we talked about tracks, what else moves at high speeds? On tracks bananas, no trains, Um, and we've got mag leave bananas. No, I mean trains. So why not you know, motor propelled magnetic levitation elevators. People have actually suggested this. Yeah, it's an interesting idea. Yeah, and Okay, they'd use a lot of energy and they'd create a lot of heat

that you need to figure out how to dispel. But you could have multiple cabs in any given shaft moving around at the same time, and they wouldn't have to go just up and down. We're like basically talking about a wonkovator. But the really cool idea here, Yeah, allowing them to go a multiple directions means that you wouldn't have to wait on one car in one shaft, like you said, You could have multiple cars moving around like in a circle, so that you just have to wait

until the next one arrives. Yeah. Also, the snowsberries would taste like snowsberries, they would. I dispute you. I've got I've got five little guys outside who have a whole song about it. I've got one really big guy. Uh right now, none of these maglev elevators exist. Um. Longtime elevator company Otis was playing with the idea in the late nineties, but eventually shelved it. Uh Fisson Krupp, which is the designer of the one World Trade Center elevators,

and a local company here for us. They're up in Alpharetta. I didn't know that. Yeah, they've got their own version called Project Multi, which is in the works. It's it's vertical shafts would connect via these like horizontal turnstiles, which would let a single elevator cab like snake its way through a bill being as needed, and as of last summer, their plan was to test a prototype in Germany as of Yeah, I don't I don't know. So I think the idea of Maglave elevators is a really interesting one

and definitely has some promise in general. At this particular company, I'm not sure about because I I saw a piece kind of critical of their proposal in the I think it was a tech opinion piece in Al Jazeera, and so I don't know what to think about that. Also, it seemed like I was trying to find recent stuff on their proposal and couldn't. But maybe maybe they're just working on it. Yeah. The last that I could find about it was in the middle of Yeah, but you

know who knows. Maybe they're they're quietly doing it. Yeah. Well, you know what's interesting also is that we've seen some really cool um proposals for skyscraper design not necessarily meant to be put into practical construction. Sometimes it's more of a here's a really in a sting concept. Uh that changes the way we think about what a skyscraper could be. Yeah. One of the ones I wanted to talk about is, like we said, I don't think anybody's gonna build this

anytime soon, but we can dream. It was a really cool design from the Polish architecture firm, Uh not firm, It's a Polish architecture collective called BOMB. I think that was made from the initials the last initials of the architects who were involved, but it one and Evolo Design competition with the idea of this thing called the Essence skyscraper. And essentially this is a very tall building with multiple levels,

each containing massive recreated natural environments of various climates. So one way I think, the way I put it in the video script is that it's like a gigantic multi level terrarium. But another way to think of it is it's it's sort of like going through all the episodes of Planet Earth with each level of the building, So you have levels that are caves, jungles, desert, grassland, glaciers. And I love this idea. I wish somebody would build something like this because that would be so cool to

have right in the middle of a city. The concept drawings are really cool. Like the one concept I saw, the entire exterior of the skyscraper was transparent, so you could see in and see these different environments at different like they look to be suspended in mid air because that, you know, the entire building was transparent. So it was a really sort of star trek e kind of idea.

And like you had also mentioned in your script, it gives you the opportunity to visit all sorts of different climates without ever having to leave your home city, which, depending upon what you want to do, could be great. I mean that could mean that you, instead of getting on a plane and generating a larger carbon footprint for your vacation, you go and you press a little elevator

button and you go visit the Antarctic. Yeah, and I would certainly say that I wouldn't hope that it would be a complete substitution forever going out into nature, but as something that would be close by without you having to travel a great distance. For for city dwellers, I think it would be a really great life enriching kind of thing. Yeah, I accessibility is lovely. Yeah, I just don't know how you would ever, Like, I can't imagine the energy needs that building would be, honest, in order

to maintain that many very different ecosystems. Yeah, you can't put the actually I don't know. Maybe you could put like the desert room in the glacier room next to one another, so that so that the the offput of the energy from one could could Then you're like, well, I gotta go into the swamp room. It's the one that goes in between the two. Uh. Yeah, that was lunch break. Time to go catch some crowd ads. That is a really interesting, interesting concept. Another one which we

mentioned earlier the sky Mild Tower. Yeah, this is another one that who knows if anybody will ever actually try to build anything like this right now, it's just it's an idea, it's proposal, but it is a cool one, I think. Um And so, a couple of firms called Cone Peterson Fox Associates and Leslie E. Robertson Associates have they recently proposed this thing called Sky Mile Tower, and it would be a tower in Tokyo. And actually it

wasn't just a tower they proposed. They were talking about this whole idea called Next Tokyo and it imagines the possibility of creating islands of reclaimed land in the middle of Tokyo Bay. So if you know what Tokyo Bay looks like, it's kind of an elongated oval shaped sort of thing, uh. And in the middle of it there there's a place where the land masses on both sides kind of come close together. And this would imagine creating

this artificial archipelago across that area. And and some of the islands are like these hexagonal yeah things that you know, they look extremely man made, yes, And the whole concept drawings, I should say, yeah, And the idea of it is that it would it would not just be a place for for transit and for you know, high occupancy buildings, but that it would also serve a function for the city, uh in protecting the rest of the bay from extreme

coastal weather events and breaking up incoming waves. Sort of like the idea of how can we continue to build if Tokyo continues to grow, how can we continue to build in a way that also takes into account things like climate change, which could end up causing greater, more frequent violent weather events. Uh, and yet we still have this this other demand of continuing to grow our our city and furthermore, the obvious problem that we've seen with with tsunami and stuff like that. Yeah. So so why

call it the sky Mild Tower. Well, because if actually built, the tower would be about eaters tall, which is about one vertical mile. Yeah, at one point six kilometers so yeah, oh yes, because kilometers instead of that is so tall, this would uh, this would make that that other tower I was talking about that's actually in the process of being built, uh look tiny in comparison. Yes. So, so, right now, the tallest building in the world is the

Birch Khalifa in Dubai. Yes, that's the biggest mega tall building that exists, and that is around eight hundred and thirty meters tall. So this would be almost doubling the height of the tallest skyscraper in the world right now, which is already hard for me to imagine I without actually going to Dubai and seeing this this building in person, it's very difficult for me to imagine a building that tall.

I don't have a good I don't have a really good idea of how long a mile is, like being annoyed by like three quarters the way through it that I'm still walking. Yeah, So so if you were to imagine a mile straight up, that makes it even more challenging, right, because most of us don't jump that high, So I'm unfortunately not Spider Man. Yeah. When you when you hear the dudes of the gym bragging about their mile time, it's like no, no, no no, no, I'm talking about a

vertical mile. So again, like we were saying earlier, this is this is sort of a concept. It's not necessarily something that's going to be put into there, don't There don't appear to be any plans to fund this or building yet. But maybe it's just meant as more of kind of like getting some ideas on the table, sort of inspiring people to say, if we were going to try to do something like this, how would we do it?

And I think that's cool to do. Yeah, And it may end up being that it inspires someone to take preps uh uh a less um uh, you know, a less extreme approach, but one that would incorporate a lot of the same ideas and philosophy ease from that design. One last thing I do want to say is if you're interested in the sky Mile Tower proposal, you can read more about it their proposal papers hosted on the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats page, which I

didn't know there was a council for that. There is, so it is like the Council of Wizards. The one I want to tell you you must destroy this ring and build this building. The one I wanted to mention that I saw that thought was really cool was a design that has casually been referred to as the Mountain band Aid and it's ah. It was part of a skyscraper design concept design competition. I think it took third

place in two thousand and twelve. But it was a response to China's mining industry, which a lot of people view as being particularly destructive to the environment and to people who live in the local area. Uh. It can impact their lives in a very negative way, particularly when you remember that China is our main source for rare earth minerals, so there are a lot of very aggressive mining projects throughout the country. The Mountain band aid looks like what would happen if you were to cover a

surface of a mountain with with a building. So the building, the building actually uh conforms to the curves and contours of the mountain itself. So it's a skyscraper in the sense that the mountain is scraping the sky exactly. It's as tall as the mountain is, but not taller, so

it's not much taller. Yeah, it juts out from the mountain's surface, which raises questions, right like, how would you get further up the Would there be special elevators that would go at an at an angle so that you could get from the bottom of the base of the

mountain up to the top snaky Magla elevators. Maybe it's possible, But it was just it was really kind of a very interesting artistic design, and it was meant to be away of saying, let's let's place a band aid the idea of healing the damage that has been done to China's mountain sides and give back a place for the people who live there to to live, work, play a place that is good, a good, you know, healthy kind

of place to live. It's really interesting. Again, it was meant as kind of an inspirational concept, not something that would ever practically be built. But um yeah, let's let's talk a little bit. Now we've we've covered all the kind of dream ideas, the engineering challenges, the fact that we do expect to see cities continue to grow based upon projections. Should we really invest in building vertical civilizations? What are what are some of the reasons to do it?

What are some of the reasons that maybe maybe not necessarily reason not to do it, but things we have to keep in mind. Well, I think the most obvious pro and the main one that we should think about

his horizontal efficiency. It would bring it so if you have a city and you can concentrate it into vertical volume, so you shrink it down and you have less distance to drive from place to place, it would just bring all of the city dwellers activity points in life closer and closer together, meaning they spend less time, less money, less energy, and less carbon emissions getting from one place

to another. So, assuming that you are able to live, work, and play in the same vertical city, then, uh, it makes it much easier. It reminds me actually when when my wife went on a tour of various homes, there was like this this thing that happens every year where in different neighborhoods in Atlanta, you can go and tour different types of homes to just to see how how

they're set up. It was when Pont City Market, the building that our offices in, was just showing off a model loft, and so she to check it out just to see it. And she came back and talked to me about it, and I said, so, uh, would you ever want to move there? And she said no, because I hate the thought that you would be able to roll out of bed five minutes before you have to be at the office, take an elevator, and you're there where I have to go, get in the car, drive

across the city. Like, oh, so it's because you're petty. I understand. All the best decisions are made out of spite. Um. I was trying to think of a con and I guess one that occurred to me. I hate to say this, it's kind of morbid to think about, but I do think maybe it's worth mentioning. Is that when you're concentrating more and more people into more space, especially if you're

considering skyscrapers. September eleventh starts to kind of come to some people's minds, probably especially in the United States, and it makes you think that, well, if you're worried about the possibility of nuclear war, a large scale terrorist attack, or something like that, gathering more and more and more people into smaller and smaller spaces, this is essentially a worst case scenario, making making it easier to do more damage to human life and in human civilization with fewer

strikes on On the other hand, Uh, like we've mentioned before, one of the cool things about trying to do this is you end up identifying what are your challenges, what are your barriers to actually making a vertical city and a super tall building become a reality? Yeah, And once you identify them, then you have to start engineering away

to to solve that problem. Yeah. It's a con when you're starting out, but it becomes a pro when you've designed all of this amazing new technology, yeah, which could possibly be put to use in other applications, not necessarily just for your vertical city or super tall building. Which is very similar to what we say about pure research, like you never know what the benefits will be when you set out to do something like this, So I would say that's a pro There are other cons as well.

I mean, obviously we we mentioned the the in case of emergency one, how do you effectively evacuate a building that has that many people in that small a footprint, Like you've got a huge amount of floor space collectively, but when you look at the actual base of the building and you think how many people are represented in this square footage at the base, it's enormous, And so you have serious traffic issues you have to think about

when you in the case of an evacuation. Uh. Speaking of serious traffic issues, roadways are not necessarily meant at this current juncture to handle the amount of pedestrian traffic that would start happening in cities if we started building these giant vertical towers. I agree with that, But then again, I think that that may be due to the fact that we sort of have hybrid cities right now. We

have hybrid vertical and horizontal cities. So because you've got all this horizontal sprawl, you've got a lot of drivers who say, well, you know, I don't live particularly close to a train station or anything like that, so I don't so I so I drive into work. Um, if you had everybody gathered together in a pretty close area, you might have a much better case for almost everybody using public transportation and very little actual vehicle ownership. Yeah,

or walking. Yeah, that the longest part of your commute would be catching that elevator in the morning. Or I think it could be interesting if you get to a point like taking this to the science fiction extreme, where you ask someone, so, where do you work? Oh? I work over on floor Okay, yeah, I've seen that on my way down to floor to twelve's neighborhood. Yeah. Yeah, well and and then and then the petty thing would be like, well, I want to live in this building

because it's where my office is. Well, but but I work in the building next door. And that's just a note. That's that's a breaker. Get up and get in the elevators.

And Joe and I also talked about what if you went to the dystopian extreme where your entire society is contained within your vertical building, and you then have your vertical building have very little contact with other vertical buildings, so then eventually get to a point where generations thousands of years later, you come out of the buildings and meet the people from the other buildings and you're all very different genetic strains and the grays at that point, Yeah,

occasionally you have to do genetic genetic exchanges just to keep everyone viable. And granted, that's that's like Terry Gilliam level science fiction right there. But yeah, yeah, that's that's

pretty far out. Um uh bringing it back just a little bit from there, Yeah, you've got that that thing that I was talking about a little bit at the top of the show, where other infrastructure, like like getting enough water to that building, getting enough food to that building, we're we're having we're seeing problems and we talked about

this in the Mega City episode a little bit. We're already having problems, uh getting enough energy and food and clothing in water to to everyone who currently in cities.

So introducing a whole new element, it just it's not an insurmountable problem, and it's certainly the kind of thing that that I hope that this kind of line of thought brings about new solutions to but it's something I mean, it could cause some serious growing pains in the mean line, and the real issue here is that the growing pains are happening whether we go up or we go out right,

because that's the trend. So so it's important for us to look at those solutions first because those problems are going to hit us no matter whether we choose to build super vertical civilizations or not. Uh. But this has been a really interesting discussion, largely uh fanciful towards the end. But that's that's the way I like. I like to

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