Skyscrapers

[starone]

Watching a film showing New York, and it made me wonder who built the first skyscraper and how high was it? Also, is there a limit to the height they can go and do they have to dig really deep foundations? Does anyone know? I am guessing the reason to build upwards is to save land and am also wondering in view of the size of America, why they have bothered.

[boxtops]

There has always been competition to build higher and higher - the book I;ve just been reading describes how they stuck a pylon on top of the Chrysler tower to make it taller than the just finished Central Plaza building http://www.skyscraper.org/TALLEST_TOWERS/tallest.htm and
http://www.burjkhalifa.ae/the-tower/worlds-tallest-towers.aspx

[jno]

Chicago had the first skyscrapers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Insurance_Building

First they had to figure out how to give a building a separate steel frame and hang the walls on it. Before that they just built walls from the ground up, higher and higher till the ground floor walls had to be several feet thick to support the weight.

Then they needed lifts to be invented to get people to higher floors.

Then they needed revolving doors to be invented - otherwise the gusts of air from lifts would suck you into or out of the building.

There's lots of room in America, but not on (for instance) Manhattan, which is quite small. But the only ones there are at the southern tip and in the middle, where the ground is mostly solid rock.

[Peter Pedant]

It is meant to be the Flatiron building 1902
which you can wiki

I dont think they mention - Adam, yes George IV's architect designed one - around 1820 but not surprisingly it wasnt built.

[starone]

Thanks for the answers. Still a mystery to me why they bother but I can see from boxtops answer that competition has a lot a lot to do with it. People!!

[starone]

Read your link jno and found it very interesting. And for the first time I also found the related questions interesting, because they really are related! I think I am now fully au fait with skyscrapers!

[Zacs-Master]

One of the reasons They 'bother' is company prestige. Manhattan which is home to NYs tallest buildings is, or was, THE place to have your head office and still is for many companies. The number of staff and facilities required simply means there isn't enough land to build on the ground. Manhattan s grid style street system (pinched from Glasgow incidentally) also restricted plot sizes. The same principles also apply to many other cities.

[jd_1984]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_of_Bologna

Surely these are the worlds first skyscapers??

[jno]

the first skyscrapers were the pyramids. The first building higher than the Great Pyramid was Lincoln Cathedral.

"Everything's up to date in Kansas City
They gone about as fer as they can go
They went an' built a skyscraper seven stories high
About as high as a buildin' orta grow"

[Clanad]

As jno reports the first "skyscraper" was only 10 stories high, built in Chicago in 1885.

The requirement for supporting any large structure is first dependant on the foundation. Almost all require reaching bedrock for such support. This can be just a few feet under the top soil (over burden) or several hundreds of feet.

In the case of deeply buried bedrock, such as a hotel and universtiy building that were built in the midwestern city of Fargo, North Dakota, perhaps 20 years or so ago. Fargo lies on the site of an ancient lake bed (it actually has a name... Lake Agassiz, which, until roughly 10,000 years ago, was one of North America's chain of Great Lakes but drained for some reason) under which the bed rock is several hundreds of feet deep. In this case concrete caissons were drilled into the clay down to a depth of roughly 100 feet, but never reached bedrock. The sheer numbers of such caissons though, were enough to support the structure. For this 10 story structure, over 250 such caissons were drilled and filled with steel and concrete...

[heathfield]

The City of Dundee has something of a claim for the first skyscraper. It's for a nine-storey tenement building built in the 1860s. Although one storey less than the Chicago skyscraper, it was built 20 years before...

http://www.leisureandculturedundee.com/library/streethighland

[giveup]

On a guided walk around Edinburgh our guide told us that Edinburgh had the first skyscraper,known as tenements.

[jno]

the ancient Romans built tenements, sometimes up to nine storeys; so the worthy burghers of Dundee weren't quite pioneers in the field.