June 14, 2018 • 52 mins
Skyscrapers are much more than tall buildings. They're world wonders as far as we're concerned. From design to construction, these babies are beautifully simplistic in all the best ways. Listen in today!
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everyone, we're coming to Salt Lake City, Utah and Phoenix,
Arizona this fall. Yeah, October, we're going to be at
Salt Lake Cities Grand Theater and then the next night
October will be in Phoenix. And we added a second
show to our Melbourne show, right, that's right, a second
earlier show in Melbourne. So you can get all the
information for all of these shows at s y s
(00:22):
K live dot com. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles stef you took
Bryant almost forgot what I say first smooth the sandpaper,
(00:45):
and then and there's Jerry right there. So this is
the old stuff you should know. The triad, Yeah, but
not that kind. What kind you know, like sexual? I
don't think they call us triads. Sure, that's that's normally
(01:05):
like a tryad's like three mafia families getting together something
like that and having sex. Right, No, I think uh,
I think a triad very much can can apply to
a three person couple, romantic couple. I'm sure we will
hear about that. Yeah, well, well you have. I think
that's where I learned it. Oh, I got you. We
should also speaking of sex, we should also give a
(01:27):
bit of a mia culpa. We use the word prostitute
and a couple of recent episodes, I think collar bombs
and drug courts and that is not the okay word
these days. The words you use as sex worker. And
I knew that, and I feel bad for saying it.
I do too, so sorry. It's all the sex workers.
(01:47):
And we've had sex workers right in before with stories
and saying, you know, you should do a podcast on
this because it's not always what you think, right, And
we will someday. First we're gonna do skyscrapers. Yeah, and
I gotta say, man, this is um. I prefaced the
tsunami episode with like core stuff, you should know type stuff.
(02:10):
I think this one falls in there, and I kept
maybe it's the little kid in me, with like erector
sets and lego and stuff like that. But I kept thinking, man,
skyscrapers are so incredibly simplistic. It's so beautiful, and I
think some beauty and simplicity is something that really gets me.
(02:34):
You love Acam's razor, yeah, you love it, But the skyscrapers.
When I was just reading about how these things are
constructed and all. I'm just like, it's like a little
kid designed it. Yeah. I actually looked around him, like,
am I missing a section or two on this article?
But it's they're pretty straightforward. Actually, yeah, it's They're all
just giant penises in the sky, no doubt. Man. Some
(02:57):
of them don't even try to hide it. They've got
like dages and stuff and a man's name at the top. Yeah,
it's crazy. It's like, uh yeah, I I in researching this,
I was like, oh, okay, I get it. Skyscrapers are
the jerks of the buildings community. Yeah, well except maybe
(03:18):
not because they're super efficient at holding people. And sure, sure, okay,
So that's well put man. I'm glad you said that,
because it's a there's a bit of a dichotomy going
on here. You got the good, you got the bad.
You gotta put them both together, and there you have skyscrapers.
All right. So this article in House of Work starts
(03:40):
out very appropriately and talking about the quest for height,
and this has been going on since ancient times, whether
it's a church, cathedral or a Tower of Babel, which
I looked into that little bit because I was trying
to see how metaphoric that was that Nimrods. Didn't he
build at you know that Nimrod and think so I
(04:03):
don't remember, but go ahead, sorry, well, uh forget the
Tower of Babel. Just ancient buildings, like from the Pyramids
to the cathedrals. Everyone has always wanted to build things
tall because it's a striking thing and it probably has
a lot to do with the ego of the man
who wanted his name either on it or behind it. Yeah,
(04:27):
especially if you're part of a civilization that believes in
God and you tend to think that God is in
the sky. It's a bit saying like, hey, look at
look at how close I am here. This building is
in my name, Look at me, Look upon me and
my building. It's a giant Pallas. Yeah, to the point
where there are literal competitions and like I'm gonna add
(04:52):
one extra story or build the little antenna five ft
higher just to have that claim. You know, there's something
very similar in the roller coaster world, which I think
we talked about. But at least it's a roller coaster,
you know what I'm saying. It's not just a building.
This is like I'm going to build the taller roller
coaster than you and the people who ARRIVEE me, you're
going to be seven percent more scared than your riders.
(05:14):
That's that's doing something, if you ask me, you know.
But yeah, so there is a there's there's a definite
um benefit to building up and early on, yes, it
was just basically to glorify a king or a god
or something like that. Right. But over time, as people
um started settling together in city centers, uh and wanting
(05:39):
to be close to the city center, there was a
good reason to start building upward. Is that space outward
was either at a premium or people didn't want it.
They wanted to be in one specific spot. So the
the only option you have aside from outward is either
upward or downward. We haven't gotten a subterranean buildings yet,
(05:59):
I hope to God would never do. So we started
building upward. And that's where skyscrapers first came up came from.
And um they came about I think in the late
eighteen hundreds, the eighteen eighties, and I believe the first
one was the Home Life building in Chicago ten whopping stories. Yeah,
(06:19):
that was a skyscraper back then, and I tried to
found the first person who said that, but I couldn't. Um,
I found something on it. Oh well, I heard Chicago
is where it originated the term. Yeah, yes, as far
as buildings go, but it's been in use for a
long time before that to describe anything tall, including people.
(06:41):
What So, like a very tall woman, you could be
like that, gal's a real skyscraper, ain't for real? Fresh
It's right, that's exactly how that go down. But yeah,
you could use it for like a tall sale on
a boat. I've heard that tall horse. Anything tall would
(07:01):
be called the skyscraper. So it was just inevitable people
are going to start referring to tall buildings as skyscrapers.
All right, Well there you have it. So what you're
doing with the skyscrapers literally fighting gravity? Um? And you
know we mentioned pyramids. When you think about uh like
a cheerleader pyramid, how they how they reference it in
(07:21):
the article. You need the higher you go, you need
more uh support underneath, And so with the pyramid you
just go wider. And in theory, you could build something
as tall as you want as long as you kept
going wider and wider with its foundation to support it.
But like you said, you can't do that because people
(07:42):
live near one another and these are in city centers.
So they had to come up with some you know,
with with the eighteen hundreds skyscrapers that were brick and mortar,
you could only go so high before it just wasn't
possible anymore. They'd just be simply too much weight on
that foundation. So it took advancement, and a very specific
advancement iron and steel, uh, in order to build these
(08:08):
things taller, right, and and so look, one of the
other problems with brick and mortar is that and not
just supporting the weight. You could add more brick and
more mortar, but either you're going to start spreading further
and further out and create a bigger and bigger footprint
for your building and start running up against your neighbors,
or you're using up more and more of the space
(08:29):
and the lower floors, so you have like maybe like
a little chamber corridor that you can make it through
and then that's it for your lower floors. So it
doesn't make any sense. But with the advent of iron
and steel, you suddenly had relatively um lighter, stronger, and
(08:49):
thinner basically building materials to work with, so you could
go way taller and use up way less of a
footprint on the ground. Yeah. And you know, it started
with iron, so you could get these super long, sturdy,
solid beams. Uh. And then of course steel was even
lighter and stronger than iron. Actually came from iron or
(09:11):
comes from iron. Yeah, it's like super pure iron. Yeah,
and that the deal. I looked up that Bessemer process
a little bit, and then it glazed over a bit.
They mentioned the Bessemer process, but it was really something
called the open hearth process from sixty five that really
like brought steel into mass production. Is that just literally
removing impurities from iron is how you get steel. From
(09:33):
what I understand, it's super pure iron um. And I
mean steel has been around for since I think the
thirteenth century BC, so thousands of years we've been using steel.
But for the most part it's just been like some
some artists in blacksmith who like works with one small
piece at a time, and the steel that they were
(09:54):
making was not very good. It was pretty brittle, and
it was stronger than like you know, your average rock
or some thing like that, but you couldn't make a
building out of it. Then once they figured out that
Bessemer process and then the open hearth process where they
purified iron and could make large amounts of it at once.
Now you suddenly have the kind of climate that skyscrapers
(10:15):
couldn't be built in. Yeah, you know, the old saying
was you can't make a building from a long sword.
Now you can't or is it a broadsword either one?
It depends on what country you're in. Okay, alright, so
let's talk about my favorite part of this whole thing,
which is the skeleton and the superstructure. It's just so
(10:35):
beautifully simplistic. Again, the steel skeleton is the support structure
of a skyscraper. And these are literally just vertical columns
made up of metal beams that are riveted together end
to end right in a big giant box. And then
at every floor, first floor, a second floor, third floor,
(10:57):
I'll keep going. You're gonna have obviously horizontal girders and
those are just I was gonna say strapped. That wouldn't
be very safe there. Those are just riveted. A good
ratchet strap will do it right. Strapped with like a
bit of leather, that's it. That's what holds them together.
(11:18):
Those are riveted to the columns and that's it on top. Right,
So yeah, you've got we've got vertical columns going up,
you have girders going horizontally, and then you'll have like
diagonal supports that stabilize the girders. Right, came along a
little later, right. But all of these things put together,
(11:39):
it forms like like what it's called the skeleton, the
structure of the building, and it holds up everything because
everything is connected to those vertical columns, right, which is
pretty great, but it creates an issue in that all
the weight is getting transferred straight down through those vertical columns. Yeah,
(12:00):
that's what it does. So like all the horizontal weight,
like from the floors, from like the desks you put
in there, from the dry wall, from everything, it all
gets transferred to those vertical columns, which means that you
better have some number one sturdy vertical columns. But you
can't just build this thing on the sidewalk. You've got
to You've got to you've got to mount them pretty
(12:20):
well to the to the earth. And the way you
do that is there's a sub layer of clay that
you want to dig down to. Depending on how heavy
your building is if it's really heavy, you want to
dig down to the bedrock, which is the actual crust
of the earth. The rest is, you know, just debris
and detritus. Yeah. This, this substructure, I think is the
kind of the coolest thing. I agree. So you remember
(12:42):
we were talking about how, um, if you build with
brick and mortar, the taller you build, the thicker the
walls have to be to where you have like basically
no room left in the lower levels. They figured out
how to take that and put it underground and then
build a superstructure on top of it. And that's they did. Yeah.
So each little vertical column, and to make it simple,
(13:03):
let's just think of four corners of a building. Um
though the structure is much more complicated than that with
huge buildings obviously, But each one of those vertical columns
sits on a spread footing, which is basically and if
you look at the picture on the website article or
just google it, it's really again beautifully simplistic. It sits
on a big square cast iron plate, and then that
(13:25):
sits on what's called grillage, which are just stacks of
horizontal steel beams and they're just lined up and then
it's almost like a jinga tower. You'll you'll line them
up going one way, and then the next layer will
be lined up going the other way. And they've done
little math to figure out how many they need. And
that grillage sits on concrete, this big concrete pad. It's
(13:49):
on that clay or the bedrock, and then all of
that stuff is buried in concrete, very good measure, just
for good measures, and then they coat that. And Butter Scott,
I know that that's not getting good. So you've, like
you said, you just got this this pyramid essentially underground
supporting each column. The toughest pyramid anyone has ever made
(14:13):
in the history of humanity is one of these these
um spread footings. Tougher than the one from Bringing On
the movie. Yes, tougher than that one. This is a
good movie, by the way, that's what I've heard. Um.
But that's just under one vertical column. And again, if
you have just a simple four column structure, you've got
four of those taking the weight and distributing the force
(14:35):
of gravity pressing down on every square centimeter of this building.
It's it's going down to the spread footing and just
being distributed back into the earth, saying there you go, fellas,
go on your very way and leave this building. Be
that's right. I will take your load and spread it thin.
And before we take a break, we should mention that
(14:55):
all of this means this, this skeletal structure mean is
that your outer walls, which are the curtain walls, um,
they can be wide open. And so that's why you
see floor to ceiling glass and a lot to most
of these. Yeah, you don't need it to support anything, no,
just itself. That's the only thing it has to support.
(15:17):
So that was like a huge revolution in in construction.
The idea that you could build with this new material,
well not new but newly refined material, newly available material
that could support huge tall building and that you could
just put an outside wall onto. Well, then now you
can do whatever you want with these things. It really
kind of open things up and there was a huge
(15:39):
change in construction design and skyscrapers pretty quickly after they
were introduced. You want to take a break before we
talk about that, Yeah, because the functionality of this, which
comes next is uh, probably my second favorite thing. Oh boy,
(16:17):
All right, Chuck. So we're talking functionality, which, as you said,
is your second favorite thing about skyscrapers, right, Well, yeah,
because you think of an architect thinking, man, let's just
build this tall thing. But there's there's a function of
the building beyond let's make it look cool or impressive,
which is people live and work and run business out
(16:40):
of these things. Hey, by the way, I'm sorry man,
this is so it doesn't even qualifies a tangents so
off base, but you just said architect. One of our
architect friends, Adam Puffin and his wife Serena, welcome their
second son recently. Oh great, So congratulations you guys. And
I also while I'm at it, I want to give
out out to my friends Laurel and Branden for their
(17:04):
second son as well. So everybody's having second sons these days.
In congratulations to all of you guys. That's great. You
know Adam, Um, I'm actually building my house up and
putting on a second story. And sent some plans to
Adam that didn't quite look right. Said, hey, man, you
know you told me in New York to hit you
up for a little free consult And he said, here's
(17:26):
what's wrong. And he went and just sent me back
a little advice sketch. Oh that was very cool, and
I was like, he kind of solved it. He's like,
it was fine. They just head it upside down. Now
it's fixed, gonna be weird looking. Yeah, that was nice
of him. Did you send him like a muffin basket
or something. I didn't, but maybe I'll send him like
some baby booties. Now, Oh, there you go, because made
(17:48):
of muffets, baby booties. All right, So these things have
to be functional because people work in them. Big business
runs out of these things. Important things happen, and much
like when we were designing our second floor, it's not
as easy as just boom, there's a second story. When
(18:09):
we were working with our local architect, he was like, well,
you gotta get up there. And that's when it first
hit me of the problem. What wait, what did he
mean by that? You have to be able to access
the second story. So that's when it really hit home
the problem of stairs. And he was like, no one
ever thinks about it. And he said that's usually the
biggest issue when designing, like a second floor build on
(18:32):
an existing home is that you've got to fit stair somewhere.
In the case of skyscrapers, those stairs become elevators. Right,
which you don't think about it at all. And yeah,
it's you would not have skyscrapers if you didn't have elevators,
and it just so happens that they coincided at about
(18:52):
the same time. Yeah, I think in New York a
department store in eightifty seven was the first passenger evader.
It was an Otis brand elevator. That's great, was it really? Yeah? Yeah,
I think built by Elijah Otis himself. I love that.
I'm pretty sure it's a him. I'd feel really terrible
(19:13):
if that was, like, like the inventor of the elevator
was a woman and I didn't know it. You know,
I agree for shame. I guess the h makes it
a him. If it was Eliza Otis, then it'd be
a woman. But Elijah Otis is the man's version of
that probably so okay, but we'll check on that. Uh
and if we're wrong, then we will have re recorded
(19:34):
that and you will never know. But this elevator is
it points out this article is very plainly like it's
a balancing act, like you need to get you can't
have a lobby full of people standing in line for
fifteen minutes because you don't have enough elevators, but then
elevator chefts take up a lot of room in the building.
So you've got to do the math and figure out
(19:56):
the perfect little balance between how many people can we
have in this office tower and how many elevators do
we need to get them there in due time? Right?
And so first of all, we talked about elevators in
our elevators episode. Great episode if you remember correctly. Um,
but when you add elevators, you're taking up valuable real estate, right, Like,
(20:17):
that's just a place where you can't put in office
because you've got an elevator shaft going there. So if
you want to make your money back on the that
real estate, you got to add more floors. But if
you have more floors, you have more people. If you
have more people, you need more elevators. So they're an
architect to do, right. You just go home for the day.
Elijah O just by the way, either a magnificently bearded
(20:40):
woman or an actual man. Good okay, remedia update. Yeah,
and look at the hair too. He's basically got my haircut,
except it's a little wavier on the sides. Nice. So
we couldn't have skyscrapers without elevators. Apparently, think five or
(21:00):
six floors is about the max you would want to
not have an elevator in. And this is all before
the American with Disabilities Act, right, So just just from
just logistically speaking, you couldn't go more than five or
six floors, So we've got elevators. There's also another innovation
that had to happen, and that was with um like
fire sprinklers, which those came surprisingly late for a lot
(21:25):
of commercial buildings, like there are a lot of hotel
fires up until the early nineteen eighties that killed a
lot of people before they finally mandated that you need
sprinklers in these things because it's ridiculously dangerous to not
have fire sprinklers. But with the advent inspired fire sprinklers,
it made buildings a lot, a lot safer um and
(21:48):
that was one thing that you want to have in
a high rise or a skyscraper because it's really it
takes a while to get downstairs during a fire, so
you just want the fire to be put out so
you can get back to work. Yeah, and then the
final little piece of that puzzle of design is uh too,
it should be a place people want to be in
(22:08):
an office they want to work in within reason, so
the comfort of the occupants is a big deal. Um,
when they designed the Empire State Building, they wanted to
make sure that no one would ever be more than
fifty sorry, thirty feet away from a window, which is
a nice a nice thing to do. It is because sunlight,
(22:29):
everyone knows, reaches thirty two ft. So there you get.
And did you uh did you see? Did you look
up this commerce bunk in Germany? No? I didn't, I
did not. It's really lovely. They have all these indoor
gardens and it's just gorgeous. It's like a place that
you look at and you think and you know it's
(22:50):
not they're not silk plants. They're real trees and things.
Oh yeah, it is beautiful. I love that, Like, I
just love that about buildings that have like indoor straight
up like gardens. You know, there's, um, there's one I
can't remember where it is, somewhere in Dunwoody that has
like waterfalls and stuff like that and trees going in there.
(23:14):
Like I always appreciated embassy suites because they usually I
don't think they do anymore, but they used to have
like whole like gardens and stuff in the in the
lobby and everything. There's just something about a garden inside
a house or a building that says like we own
you nature, you know, wonderfully oppressive thing. Maybe that's what
(23:36):
I appreciate about it. What's the one in Atlanta with
the great interior atrium. I don't know, Oh, the Marriott Marquis. Yeah,
the one with the elevators. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Marquis. Yeah.
I mean it's still I can't remember. It is a
pretty famous architect and designer who I think passed away
(23:56):
within the last year or so. Yeah, and that's one
of the great And there are a lot of good
plants in there too, But that's one of the great
sort of retro interior atriums that I've seen. Yeah, it's
got that great like mod feel to it. Um. It's
just it's a good, good building. I wonder who did it.
I can't remember. Um. I remember though, being in when
(24:18):
I was a I believe a senior in high school.
That was where the party was on New Year's Eve
and they, you know, somehow rented rooms to a bunch
of seventeen year olds throughout the building. Yeah, that's dangerous
and it was dangerous like for real, Like I remember,
I remember hugging the only covered part was the very
(24:38):
like you had to kind of hug the wall and
you had a at a lip that you could walk under,
and I remember walking under there and seeing televisions and
potted plants like smashing on the on the floor from
idiot children off the balconies. That is so dangerous. Oh
my god. They changed. That was like the last year.
(25:00):
They had a big policy shift after that. That's like
the Lord of the Flies. It was, I mean, my
friends and I we were I mean I didn't drink
in high school, but all my friends were. But we
were all like, man, we're getting out of here. This
is bad news. So we were good kids. Good for you, buddy.
By the way, it was John C. Portman Jr. Who
(25:22):
was the architect. Nice work, all right, Chuck. Now we
come to it might be my favorite, if not second
favorite part, which is what wind does to a skyscraper
take it away? So when does some crazy stuff to
a skyscraper the end it blows on it. Yeah, actually
(25:44):
it does crazy stuff. So like the when when when
wind encounters a skyscraper, a skyscraper will sway. Okay, that's
actually Okay, they have designed skyscrapers taking into account really
heavy gusts of wind, and the building is almost certainly
not going to fall down. There's actually this really great
(26:06):
New Yorker story from the nineties about a it's called
the fifty nine Story Crisis, and it's about the City
Corps Center, which in eight opened and after it opened,
basically the architect or the engineer realized he like didn't
carry a one or something like that, and that the
(26:26):
whole building was in danger of collapsing fully occupied now,
and that there were there were hurricanes headed toward New
York that had just the kind of wind that could
knock this building down. So they did like this emergency
retro like um like support structure addition, like they carved
(26:47):
out the interior walls and just started working on it,
and they managed to save the building for so the
dampers different. This was like they added like basically extra rivets.
He went cheap on the river, It's or something like that. Well,
I did think it was funny. In the article it said,
you know one thing you can do is just simply
tighten up the rivets and things. Right, I'm like, when
(27:08):
do you go? May I feel like it's tight enough. Well,
so I think, right, more than perfectly tight. Right. I
think they're saying, if you add more rivets and more places,
it'll it'll make the building stronger, and and um, it won't.
It won't um strain underneath the wind. The problem is
(27:32):
is what you've just done is create like a very
solid pole, and just with any kind of pole, when
it sways, the end of it, like a fishing pole,
is the part that bobbles the most. Right, same thing
with the skyscraper. So the upper floors are really and
they they're subject to sway from the wind. Again, they
(27:52):
usually except for this city Corp thing, they usually account
for this stuff and then something. But the problem is
humans get really freaked out, and not just like psychologically,
like on a primal level, get really freaked out when
we're high up and we start moving and we're not
we're not under it's not under our control. So like
(28:16):
the building might be sound, but if word gets out
from people that that it sways, people will think it's
not sound, and so you'll never sell the upper floors,
you'll never run out the upper floors, and maybe the
whole building will be stayed away from because people will
think it's going to collapse at any moment. So because
of this rumor, mill engineers actually designed for the most
(28:37):
sensitive people, um, who I think can sent something like
fifteen milli ges. So a G is like a force
of acceleration, which is actually what you're sensing when you're
swaying somewhere, like in the top of a building. This
is fifteen thousands of one G. Right when you're on
a roller coaster, you're experiencing like three four five g's
(29:00):
is fifteen thousands of one G. And that's what they
designed for. Because beyond that, they found people will start
complaining and then word might get out to the buildings unsound,
like bring more in here. He's a real whimp. Yeah,
exactly what do you think more? Oh right, Okay, tighten
it up, everybody. But tight tightening it up only goes
(29:21):
so far, right, Um, If the taller you get, tightening
doesn't help. So you've got to add other stuff. They
come up with some pretty ingenious stuff for that. Yeah,
Like in the sort of I guess what I would
call the Middle period, like empire state building period, they
started just around that elevator shaft in the middle just
trusting that up with more beams, diagonal beams, and then
(29:43):
more recently they've just built these huge concrete cores right
in the center of the building. But that's not the
coolest part, is it. No, the dampers the coolest part,
or the mass tune damper. I think, yeah, you're tuned
mass damper. I'm sorry, and I think we' talked about this.
It must have been in the nine eleven memorial. Yeah,
(30:03):
I think so. But this is one of those things
that again it seems like, whoa, they're getting really complex
because they're using computers and things now, but at its root,
tuned massd amper system is also super rudimentary, don't you think, Yeah,
it really is. So like if the building swaying one way,
they'll put like a huge like concrete disc on top
(30:26):
of some oil or something so it can slide, and
they'll move that the opposite way. So it's like, you know,
how like if you're walking a tight rope or on
like a train track or something like that, and you
start to sway one way like you're gonna fall off,
you shift your body's weight the other way and you
managed to stay upright. This is the same thing but
with the building going one way, the concrete disc goes
(30:48):
the other way, and the building sway is kept within
an acceptable limit. Yeah, I mean, it's it's amazing that
someone just said, what if we what if we swung
a big weight up there to interact this way? And
you know, it gets a little with you know, hydraulics,
and the computer is actually is what's what's monitoring the
wind and operating this thing. So that's where it gets
(31:10):
a little complicated. But at its root, it's just like
like again like a kid said, well, why don't you
just do this right? And so so there's some that
use like the huge concrete weight. Some will use enormous
gallon like um vats of water to slash back and
forth against this way. Um there's this stuff called magnet
(31:31):
or heological fluid, which changes from a solid It's normally
in a solid state, and then when you pass a
magnetic field over it, it just instantly turns to fluid.
So they have some dampers and some buildings. I don't
know if it's actually in use or not, or if
it's still proposed, but on each floor towards the center
of the building, you'll have a damper made of this
(31:52):
stuff in like a vat, and then when like say,
an earthquake is detected or some sort of seismic ac
ativity is detected, it'll trip a magnet that runs a
magnetic field over these things, and all of a sudden
they turn into liquid and they start slashing the opposite
way and keep the building from swaying too far too
(32:13):
All right, well, that's not rudimentary. No, it's not. That's magic,
that's voodoo. It is pretty pretty much. Should we take
a break, I think? I think so, man, all right,
well we'll talk a little bit about design right after this. Okay, chuck,
(32:50):
So we're on the design now, by the way. Yeah,
And the earliest ones were basically like, look at the
size of this building I built, and everyone said, well,
it's ugly as sin, And the architect and an engineer
and the builder and the owner would say, it doesn't matter.
It's taller than any of your buildings. And everyone would say,
that's that's true. But as as billings got taller and taller,
(33:13):
and like a new one went up every few months
or a few you know, every year, and some of
the city's um around the world, like New York London
those two, Um, like, it became a lot more um
important what the building looked like. Yeah. So, I mean
(33:34):
in the twenties and thirties into the forties with what
one of my favorite movements, the Art Deco movement. Love it.
You get my favorite building, which is the Chrysler Building, uh,
and the Empire State Building, which is still just gorgeous
to look at. You know. So when we're in New Zealand,
if you have time, there's a town there called Napier
(33:54):
and it got leveled by an earthquake in n and
they said, well, we're gonna rebuild the town. What's like
the current um trend in architecture. Oh, it's Art Deco.
So it's an Art Deco town. The town is it's gorgeous. Man,
it's all in like pastels and everything is just a
(34:15):
beautiful town from the nineteen thirties that they just rebuild
all all Art deco. Um. So you know that was
that rang true for a while, but then eventually you know, like, um,
you know, architecture goes and trends, and we had a
bad trend in the nineteen sixties. And in Atlanta certainly
has its share of international style buildings that is what
(34:37):
it's called, which I don't know why, but for some reason,
they sort of just reverted back to these monoliths. Uh
and and a lot of them were torn down Atlanta,
but some of them are still here and they're just
they're the ugliest buildings in the city. I like some
of them, like not necessarily the ones in Atlanta, but
like the Sears Tower, the Willis Tower is is an
(35:00):
international style. Yeah, the un interesting at least because it's staggered, right, Okay,
that's still technically international style. UN Headquarters in New York
International style. Some of them can have a retro style, now, right,
I think that's what I appreciate about something. But yeah,
you're right, and some of them are also just like that.
It's just fuggle. Yeah you know. Uh and this year's
(35:23):
are Willis Tower. We still call it this Year's tower.
Let's be honest. Um, that one is unique in that
it is uh it's it's tubes, right, yeah, and they're
staggered in height. So they kind of played with this
new thing for um. I think I don't know if
it was for the skeleton or what, but they built
(35:44):
like steel tubes and then fill them with concrete, so
that provided the structure. But they they they staggered them,
so it created this cool look to the building that
it's known for. Yeah. I did the Architectural River tour
in Chicago when I was there last summer, and the
lady we had was great and she told us the story.
I just couldn't remember it quite right. Yeah, it is
(36:06):
the Series Tower. I feel bad for Mr Willis, but
it's it's just the Series Tower. Um. And then you've
got now kind of like like whatever, whatever you want
to do, that's that's what we want. Like in some
some are great, some are not so great. But I
(36:28):
think that's always been the way with skyscrapers. Some are great,
some are not so great. But either way, you've got
a big old sky scraper in your city now, whether
you like it how it looks or not. Yeah, they're
getting kind of funky, like in a place like New
York where it's um like even one uh is it
one World Trade Center now of the Freedom Tower? Oh right,
(36:50):
but I believe they call it one WTC still as well,
now is it? I don't know, Well, it's just called
the Freedom Tower. We'll call it one World Trade Center.
You're right, um that one fits in even though it
has a newish look, but it fits into the landscape
because it's there's a lot of tall buildings in New York.
When you see like sometimes in the Middle East, like
(37:12):
in Um although Dubai has got a lot of tall
ones now or Malaysia, there will be so much taller
than the surrounding buildings that it's just sort of odd
looking to me. Well. Plus also, you know, you you
hope that the architect is going to design the thing
to fit the surroundings rather than really stand out. And
(37:35):
but regardless, I mean, these are not public buildings. These
are privately owned buildings almost across the board, and you,
the city dweller who lives there and has to look
at this thing every day, are totally at the mercy
of the person designing it. Like that's that's whatever gets
put up gets put up, and you had no say whatsoever.
And um, which can be good in a lot of cases,
(37:56):
it can also be bad. Um, but there are it
seems like more often than not, the stuff that they're
putting up these days is pretty pretty interesting to look at.
Like there's um zahahidid who I think when the prints
cure prize a couple of years ago, and I think
she died. Recently, she put up this um building. I
(38:17):
don't know if it's done yet or not, but it's
called one thousand Museum Tower in Miami, and it is gorgeous.
It's super Miami, like the exterior skeleton actually twists and
curves and they snakes around the outside of the curtain
wall even in some points. But it fits like it
fits Miami. Like you just look at this building, You're like,
(38:40):
I can't imagine that building anywhere else in the world,
or more at home anywhere else in the world that Miami.
So it's good. Like it's neat, it's interesting, it's it's
cool to look at, but it also fits the surroundings, Yeah,
for sure. And you know that one. I just looked
at it. It's that's pretty cool looking. It looks uh
some of them are looking very futuristic. Now me, that
(39:00):
looks very futuristic. Yes, yeah, which is uh, you know,
it's fine. I'm kind of I like the throwback style,
but uh, I don't mind a little future every now
and then. The question of how high can you go
is very hotly debated. Some designers and architects say, if
you had enough money, you could go a mile high.
(39:23):
Other people say, no, you probably couldn't. Um, it's not
very feasible, at least not now. Yeah, but in the future,
you know, And they say this is an efficient way
to builds up and environmentally friendly is to go up, right,
it is? It depends, It depends. Did you read that
(39:43):
one article about glass. Yeah, so that's that's pretty hotly
debated right now in the architectural community. Huh yeah. I
don't know if they're trying to start it up or
if it is actually already a thing of debate. But
there are some architects, some pretty prominent ones too, who
said we should stop like building glass towers. They're kind
(40:04):
of cold, they're unfeeling, they just don't create a sense
of community. Plus they're super wasteful, like they're really expensive
and consume a lot of energy to um heat and
cool because there's a lot of um loss of heat
and a lot of heat creeping in depending on the
time of the year, and they're just kind of wasteful actually,
(40:27):
And that coupled with the idea that there's now this
trend moving toward tearing down taller and taller buildings and
replacing them with even taller new skyscrapers, especially when there's
really nothing wrong with that skyscraper in the first place.
But say, like in in Chicago, if the Willis family
(40:48):
had known that they were their their tower was still
going to be known as the Sears Tower, no matter what.
They may have torn that thing down and built something
else in its place, right, And that seems to be
the trend. It's like, oh, that'll always be known as
you know this, this this building. I want to tear
it down and put up my own building that is
super duper wasteful. And there's those are two big criticisms
(41:11):
as far as skyscrapers are going right now, um in
the world from what I can understand. Yeah, that one
article you since said that to seventy Park in New
York will be the first building taller than two hundreds
to be demolished, and that the average lifespan. There was
a study from the the Council on Tall Buildings and
(41:31):
Urban Habitat that found the average lifespan of the one
hundred tallest demolished buildings is forty one years. That is,
that is not long enough for the amount of expense
that goes into them, the amount of materials and energy
you like, I think that same article says like these
things should be built for a hundred to two hundred years.
(41:52):
I mean, what is it a football stadium? Basically, Yeah,
they don't even have forty one years. You could me
fourteen fifteen years now, Yeah, I think about it. Man.
So like the with the Brave Stadium, the ted was
like built nine for the Olympics and it's it was
abandoned two years ago and two so it made it
(42:14):
um twenty years, twenty years and it's being used now.
Georgia State took it over. But it was a perfectly
good baseball stadium fifteen minutes from my house. And then
with the Falcons Stadium, that one there was nothing wrong
with that one. Was there the Georgia Dome Yeah uh no.
But I gotta say, man, that new Mercedes Been Stadium
(42:35):
is it nice? Man, it's awesome. I haven't been in
it yet. It's very cool. It feels like you're at
an outdoor game, even with the roof closed. Oh cool.
The way they built it, it's just you should check
it out at some point. I mean, it is beautiful,
Like I get that it's not lost on me. I'm
not just such a like a a grump or a
critic that I'm just like, no, it doesn't matter, Like
(42:56):
I get that. There's also a lot of like civic pride,
especially that goes into a building like that. Yeah, but
it's also super wasteful. We'll just tear something down while
it's still totally fine rather than renovating it. And of
course all the controversy for especially for sports stadiums, around
tax dollars paying for them, even though it's usually a
hotel tax, so they can say like it's not on you,
(43:18):
it's on the people that come to Atlanta. Yeah. I
don't know if they did that in Cobb County. I
think it was a straight up like citizens tax. I
think so for the baseball one. Um. You also send
a cool article though about wood skyscrapers and how this
is a new trend and apparently ahead of schedule. Brock
(43:38):
commons a student Uh, like, I guess it's a dormitory
at University of British Columbia is now the tallest as
of now the tallest wooden uh structure at eighteen stories. Yeah,
and you think, like, well, would that's not good? We
don't want to start using wood for sky screen is good.
Apparently it is good that it that it can it
(44:00):
can be sustainably sourced UM and that it can actually uh,
it uses like in some cases less UM energy than
creating a skyscraper using concrete and steel UM. And that's
not including like transport costs or transport emissions as well.
(44:22):
That's strictly in production UM. And that the stuff they're
making or using that's called cross laminated timber, which supposedly
is as strong as steel. The big drawback to it
is like twice the price, right now. Yeah, it's just
a it's it's like what you get with like press board.
It's it's sheets of wood glued together and compressed together.
(44:44):
And when you look at this brock Commons, it just
you know, looks like a ordinary building. And there's another
building going up somewhere in Japan I couldn't find where.
It's called the W three fifty building, which I guess
stands for wood and it's tall, which is that's a
that's like a thirty five story skyscraper made of wood
and I think ten percent steel, but the rest is
(45:05):
would UM. And that's going to be really something and
I imagine a pretty big proving ground for you know,
this this new material. Yeah, and you mentioned that it
is can be sustainable and uh, because the first thing
I thought of, of course, is like, now we're going
to tear it on the forest to build buildings. But
they say that less than one percent of the world's
(45:26):
forests are harvested each year. Um. It sounds like a
hornets nest to me. It does. But you know, they
did this in Canada and they said it was a
super green project and like the way forward. And I
trust the Canadians on that stuff, me too, man. Um,
So like we just would be the worst human beings
(45:46):
alive if we didn't talk about the tallest buildings in
the world and the competition for it. Yeah. And also
real quick, you mentioned the glass didn't what didn't they
have that one building in London that like melted a car? Yeah,
the walkie talkie building. Yeah, that was one of the
problems with glasses. Um. Do you remember And when we
were in Buckhead, the sovereign building next door. Yes, if
(46:06):
did you ever walk past it and through the beam
of light it was blinding. It was really hot too.
You could imagine like under certain circumstances, it could like
burn you. Well, there's a building in London that they
had to share it even further because it melted a
car that was parked in that beam of melted a car. Yeah,
loy alright. So the tallest, I mean it's I think
(46:30):
they said there's something like twenty buildings under construction that
will eclipse the Birge Khalifa. Oh is that right? Wow?
And is I think that's currently number one undisputed. But
the the Jettah Tower j E D D A H
in Saudi Arabia will be three thousand, two d and
(46:51):
eight feet high and that will be done in just
a couple of years. Yeah, that's that's over. It's a
thousand meters I think on the nose if I'm not
mistake it. And this is one sticks out like a
sore thumb too, It definitely does. Um. And then there's
also one that might be the tallest for a brief
time because I think it's going to be uh completed
(47:12):
before the Jetta Tower. But it's in Dubai and it's
called the Tower, and it'll be nine eight meters or
three thousand and forty five ft. That's that's I mean,
I know they say it's good to go up, but
I don't know. That stuff makes me nervous. There's a
picture of the Jetta Tower to where a substantial portion
of it, maybe the top third, is above the cloud lines,
(47:37):
and it's like, yeah, it's it wouldn't necessarily be like
that every day, but theoretically, if that's even possible, I
can't imagine how much like those upper floor pent houses
are going to go for. It's just nuts, man, but
they're building them that. I think the tower in Dubai
is expected to cost a billion dollars, which I'm like,
(47:57):
that seems kind of inexpensive to me for a thousand
meter building. Well, I know one person who wouldn't live
at the top of that thing, and he's sitting across
from me. Yeah, I'd just like to see pictures of
it and get woozy down here at sea level. I
don't even have a high thing, and that it makes
me nervous. Yeah, I'm with you, So I guess it's
(48:17):
about it. There's well, one more thing. There's a lot
of debate over what constitutes the world's tallest building, and
the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban habitat that you
mentioned before. They said that there's actually no real definition
of a skyscraper, but there are some types subcategories. I
guess where there are definitions. There's a super tall which
(48:40):
is three or more, Mega tall which is six or more,
and then a tall building is is up to three.
But I get it doesn't there's no starting basis for it.
But there you go. Skyscraper can be anything tall, just
like in the old days of it. If you want
(49:01):
to know more about skyscrapers, uh, just start looking around.
They're everywhere and you can also read about them on
how stuff works by typing skyscraper in the search bar.
And said, so, I said, that's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this very smart lady emailed us Camilla
size or c's s I s E about Akham's razor,
(49:24):
and it's very nice about it too. Yeah, did you
read this one? She said? I thought i'd give a
small clarification uh slash correction. I'd give you some insight
on the alleged subjectivity of it. Uh. You explained that
principle was, when confronted with competing explanations, one should select
the simplest one. She said, this very common misconception. It
(49:45):
should be the most parsimonious. How about that word explanation
is more likely to be true? She said. It seems nitpicky,
but eliminates a lot of the subjectivity you complained about
in the episode. The most parsimonious means most economic in
the sense that it makes the least amount of assumptions.
That makes total sense, because each additional assumption you're making
(50:08):
is an additional chance of being wrong. For example, the
ghost and the photo makes the assumption that ghosts exists
exists something that has not been proven, whereas the naturalistic
explanation doesn't need to assume the existence of any light
phenomena you used to explain that picture because those all
have been proven to exists around that. So I feel
(50:31):
like we did talk about that a little bit, but
we weren't very explicit, and I think we kind of
walked past the idea that that's the basis of the
whole thing. Yeah, she said, as you explained very well,
it doesn't disprove the ghost hypothesis, it just makes it
less likely to be true. Most of science is not
about proving things anyway, It's about inferring the most likely
explanations to phenomena. I hope that helps keep up the
(50:54):
great work that is Camilla size and that is that
is a good email. Yeah, thanks a lot, Camilla and
well but appreciate that. And a few people wrote in
kind of saying something similar, but she definitely put it best.
If you want to set us straight, you can hang
out with us on Twitter. I'm at Josh Underscore, UM Underscore, Clark,
Chuck's at movie Crush Pod, and we're both at s
(51:16):
Y s K Podcast on Twitter. Chuck's on Facebook dot
com Slash movie Crush Pod. I actually spend a lot
of time on the movie Crush Facebook page. Okay, so
if you want to hang out with Chuck on Facebook,
go to Facebook dot com Slash movie Crush. Uh. He's
also on Facebook dot com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant
and slash s Y s K or No Stuff you
(51:37):
Should Know. I mean you're all over Facebook, aren't you. Uh.
If you want to send us all including Jerry and email,
you can send it to Stuff Podcast at how Stuff
Works dot com and as always, join us at our
home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
(51:58):
it how stuff works? Dot com
Hey, everyone, we're coming to Salt Lake City, Utah and Phoenix,
Arizona this fall. Yeah, October, we're going to be at
Salt Lake Cities Grand Theater and then the next night
October will be in Phoenix. And we added a second
show to our Melbourne show, right, that's right, a second
earlier show in Melbourne. So you can get all the
information for all of these shows at s y s
(00:22):
K live dot com. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles stef you took
Bryant almost forgot what I say first smooth the sandpaper,
(00:45):
and then and there's Jerry right there. So this is
the old stuff you should know. The triad, Yeah, but
not that kind. What kind you know, like sexual? I
don't think they call us triads. Sure, that's that's normally
(01:05):
like a tryad's like three mafia families getting together something
like that and having sex. Right, No, I think uh,
I think a triad very much can can apply to
a three person couple, romantic couple. I'm sure we will
hear about that. Yeah, well, well you have. I think
that's where I learned it. Oh, I got you. We
should also speaking of sex, we should also give a
(01:27):
bit of a mia culpa. We use the word prostitute
and a couple of recent episodes, I think collar bombs
and drug courts and that is not the okay word
these days. The words you use as sex worker. And
I knew that, and I feel bad for saying it.
I do too, so sorry. It's all the sex workers.
(01:47):
And we've had sex workers right in before with stories
and saying, you know, you should do a podcast on
this because it's not always what you think, right, And
we will someday. First we're gonna do skyscrapers. Yeah, and
I gotta say, man, this is um. I prefaced the
tsunami episode with like core stuff, you should know type stuff.
(02:10):
I think this one falls in there, and I kept
maybe it's the little kid in me, with like erector
sets and lego and stuff like that. But I kept thinking, man,
skyscrapers are so incredibly simplistic. It's so beautiful, and I
think some beauty and simplicity is something that really gets me.
(02:34):
You love Acam's razor, yeah, you love it, But the skyscrapers.
When I was just reading about how these things are
constructed and all. I'm just like, it's like a little
kid designed it. Yeah. I actually looked around him, like,
am I missing a section or two on this article?
But it's they're pretty straightforward. Actually, yeah, it's They're all
just giant penises in the sky, no doubt. Man. Some
(02:57):
of them don't even try to hide it. They've got
like dages and stuff and a man's name at the top. Yeah,
it's crazy. It's like, uh yeah, I I in researching this,
I was like, oh, okay, I get it. Skyscrapers are
the jerks of the buildings community. Yeah, well except maybe
(03:18):
not because they're super efficient at holding people. And sure, sure, okay,
So that's well put man. I'm glad you said that,
because it's a there's a bit of a dichotomy going
on here. You got the good, you got the bad.
You gotta put them both together, and there you have skyscrapers.
All right. So this article in House of Work starts
(03:40):
out very appropriately and talking about the quest for height,
and this has been going on since ancient times, whether
it's a church, cathedral or a Tower of Babel, which
I looked into that little bit because I was trying
to see how metaphoric that was that Nimrods. Didn't he
build at you know that Nimrod and think so I
(04:03):
don't remember, but go ahead, sorry, well, uh forget the
Tower of Babel. Just ancient buildings, like from the Pyramids
to the cathedrals. Everyone has always wanted to build things
tall because it's a striking thing and it probably has
a lot to do with the ego of the man
who wanted his name either on it or behind it. Yeah,
(04:27):
especially if you're part of a civilization that believes in
God and you tend to think that God is in
the sky. It's a bit saying like, hey, look at
look at how close I am here. This building is
in my name, Look at me, Look upon me and
my building. It's a giant Pallas. Yeah, to the point
where there are literal competitions and like I'm gonna add
(04:52):
one extra story or build the little antenna five ft
higher just to have that claim. You know, there's something
very similar in the roller coaster world, which I think
we talked about. But at least it's a roller coaster,
you know what I'm saying. It's not just a building.
This is like I'm going to build the taller roller
coaster than you and the people who ARRIVEE me, you're
going to be seven percent more scared than your riders.
(05:14):
That's that's doing something, if you ask me, you know.
But yeah, so there is a there's there's a definite
um benefit to building up and early on, yes, it
was just basically to glorify a king or a god
or something like that. Right. But over time, as people
um started settling together in city centers, uh and wanting
(05:39):
to be close to the city center, there was a
good reason to start building upward. Is that space outward
was either at a premium or people didn't want it.
They wanted to be in one specific spot. So the
the only option you have aside from outward is either
upward or downward. We haven't gotten a subterranean buildings yet,
(05:59):
I hope to God would never do. So we started
building upward. And that's where skyscrapers first came up came from.
And um they came about I think in the late
eighteen hundreds, the eighteen eighties, and I believe the first
one was the Home Life building in Chicago ten whopping stories. Yeah,
(06:19):
that was a skyscraper back then, and I tried to
found the first person who said that, but I couldn't. Um,
I found something on it. Oh well, I heard Chicago
is where it originated the term. Yeah, yes, as far
as buildings go, but it's been in use for a
long time before that to describe anything tall, including people.
(06:41):
What So, like a very tall woman, you could be
like that, gal's a real skyscraper, ain't for real? Fresh
It's right, that's exactly how that go down. But yeah,
you could use it for like a tall sale on
a boat. I've heard that tall horse. Anything tall would
(07:01):
be called the skyscraper. So it was just inevitable people
are going to start referring to tall buildings as skyscrapers.
All right, Well there you have it. So what you're
doing with the skyscrapers literally fighting gravity? Um? And you
know we mentioned pyramids. When you think about uh like
a cheerleader pyramid, how they how they reference it in
(07:21):
the article. You need the higher you go, you need
more uh support underneath, And so with the pyramid you
just go wider. And in theory, you could build something
as tall as you want as long as you kept
going wider and wider with its foundation to support it.
But like you said, you can't do that because people
(07:42):
live near one another and these are in city centers.
So they had to come up with some you know,
with with the eighteen hundreds skyscrapers that were brick and mortar,
you could only go so high before it just wasn't
possible anymore. They'd just be simply too much weight on
that foundation. So it took advancement, and a very specific
advancement iron and steel, uh, in order to build these
(08:08):
things taller, right, and and so look, one of the
other problems with brick and mortar is that and not
just supporting the weight. You could add more brick and
more mortar, but either you're going to start spreading further
and further out and create a bigger and bigger footprint
for your building and start running up against your neighbors,
or you're using up more and more of the space
(08:29):
and the lower floors, so you have like maybe like
a little chamber corridor that you can make it through
and then that's it for your lower floors. So it
doesn't make any sense. But with the advent of iron
and steel, you suddenly had relatively um lighter, stronger, and
(08:49):
thinner basically building materials to work with, so you could
go way taller and use up way less of a
footprint on the ground. Yeah. And you know, it started
with iron, so you could get these super long, sturdy,
solid beams. Uh. And then of course steel was even
lighter and stronger than iron. Actually came from iron or
(09:11):
comes from iron. Yeah, it's like super pure iron. Yeah,
and that the deal. I looked up that Bessemer process
a little bit, and then it glazed over a bit.
They mentioned the Bessemer process, but it was really something
called the open hearth process from sixty five that really
like brought steel into mass production. Is that just literally
removing impurities from iron is how you get steel. From
(09:33):
what I understand, it's super pure iron um. And I
mean steel has been around for since I think the
thirteenth century BC, so thousands of years we've been using steel.
But for the most part it's just been like some
some artists in blacksmith who like works with one small
piece at a time, and the steel that they were
(09:54):
making was not very good. It was pretty brittle, and
it was stronger than like you know, your average rock
or some thing like that, but you couldn't make a
building out of it. Then once they figured out that
Bessemer process and then the open hearth process where they
purified iron and could make large amounts of it at once.
Now you suddenly have the kind of climate that skyscrapers
(10:15):
couldn't be built in. Yeah, you know, the old saying
was you can't make a building from a long sword.
Now you can't or is it a broadsword either one?
It depends on what country you're in. Okay, alright, so
let's talk about my favorite part of this whole thing,
which is the skeleton and the superstructure. It's just so
(10:35):
beautifully simplistic. Again, the steel skeleton is the support structure
of a skyscraper. And these are literally just vertical columns
made up of metal beams that are riveted together end
to end right in a big giant box. And then
at every floor, first floor, a second floor, third floor,
(10:57):
I'll keep going. You're gonna have obviously horizontal girders and
those are just I was gonna say strapped. That wouldn't
be very safe there. Those are just riveted. A good
ratchet strap will do it right. Strapped with like a
bit of leather, that's it. That's what holds them together.
(11:18):
Those are riveted to the columns and that's it on top. Right,
So yeah, you've got we've got vertical columns going up,
you have girders going horizontally, and then you'll have like
diagonal supports that stabilize the girders. Right, came along a
little later, right. But all of these things put together,
(11:39):
it forms like like what it's called the skeleton, the
structure of the building, and it holds up everything because
everything is connected to those vertical columns, right, which is
pretty great, but it creates an issue in that all
the weight is getting transferred straight down through those vertical columns. Yeah,
(12:00):
that's what it does. So like all the horizontal weight,
like from the floors, from like the desks you put
in there, from the dry wall, from everything, it all
gets transferred to those vertical columns, which means that you
better have some number one sturdy vertical columns. But you
can't just build this thing on the sidewalk. You've got
to You've got to you've got to mount them pretty
(12:20):
well to the to the earth. And the way you
do that is there's a sub layer of clay that
you want to dig down to. Depending on how heavy
your building is if it's really heavy, you want to
dig down to the bedrock, which is the actual crust
of the earth. The rest is, you know, just debris
and detritus. Yeah. This, this substructure, I think is the
kind of the coolest thing. I agree. So you remember
(12:42):
we were talking about how, um, if you build with
brick and mortar, the taller you build, the thicker the
walls have to be to where you have like basically
no room left in the lower levels. They figured out
how to take that and put it underground and then
build a superstructure on top of it. And that's they did. Yeah.
So each little vertical column, and to make it simple,
(13:03):
let's just think of four corners of a building. Um
though the structure is much more complicated than that with
huge buildings obviously, But each one of those vertical columns
sits on a spread footing, which is basically and if
you look at the picture on the website article or
just google it, it's really again beautifully simplistic. It sits
on a big square cast iron plate, and then that
(13:25):
sits on what's called grillage, which are just stacks of
horizontal steel beams and they're just lined up and then
it's almost like a jinga tower. You'll you'll line them
up going one way, and then the next layer will
be lined up going the other way. And they've done
little math to figure out how many they need. And
that grillage sits on concrete, this big concrete pad. It's
(13:49):
on that clay or the bedrock, and then all of
that stuff is buried in concrete, very good measure, just
for good measures, and then they coat that. And Butter Scott,
I know that that's not getting good. So you've, like
you said, you just got this this pyramid essentially underground
supporting each column. The toughest pyramid anyone has ever made
(14:13):
in the history of humanity is one of these these
um spread footings. Tougher than the one from Bringing On
the movie. Yes, tougher than that one. This is a
good movie, by the way, that's what I've heard. Um.
But that's just under one vertical column. And again, if
you have just a simple four column structure, you've got
four of those taking the weight and distributing the force
(14:35):
of gravity pressing down on every square centimeter of this building.
It's it's going down to the spread footing and just
being distributed back into the earth, saying there you go, fellas,
go on your very way and leave this building. Be
that's right. I will take your load and spread it thin.
And before we take a break, we should mention that
(14:55):
all of this means this, this skeletal structure mean is
that your outer walls, which are the curtain walls, um,
they can be wide open. And so that's why you
see floor to ceiling glass and a lot to most
of these. Yeah, you don't need it to support anything, no,
just itself. That's the only thing it has to support.
(15:17):
So that was like a huge revolution in in construction.
The idea that you could build with this new material,
well not new but newly refined material, newly available material
that could support huge tall building and that you could
just put an outside wall onto. Well, then now you
can do whatever you want with these things. It really
kind of open things up and there was a huge
(15:39):
change in construction design and skyscrapers pretty quickly after they
were introduced. You want to take a break before we
talk about that, Yeah, because the functionality of this, which
comes next is uh, probably my second favorite thing. Oh boy,
(16:17):
All right, Chuck. So we're talking functionality, which, as you said,
is your second favorite thing about skyscrapers, right, Well, yeah,
because you think of an architect thinking, man, let's just
build this tall thing. But there's there's a function of
the building beyond let's make it look cool or impressive,
which is people live and work and run business out
(16:40):
of these things. Hey, by the way, I'm sorry man,
this is so it doesn't even qualifies a tangents so
off base, but you just said architect. One of our
architect friends, Adam Puffin and his wife Serena, welcome their
second son recently. Oh great, So congratulations you guys. And
I also while I'm at it, I want to give
out out to my friends Laurel and Branden for their
(17:04):
second son as well. So everybody's having second sons these days.
In congratulations to all of you guys. That's great. You
know Adam, Um, I'm actually building my house up and
putting on a second story. And sent some plans to
Adam that didn't quite look right. Said, hey, man, you
know you told me in New York to hit you
up for a little free consult And he said, here's
(17:26):
what's wrong. And he went and just sent me back
a little advice sketch. Oh that was very cool, and
I was like, he kind of solved it. He's like,
it was fine. They just head it upside down. Now
it's fixed, gonna be weird looking. Yeah, that was nice
of him. Did you send him like a muffin basket
or something. I didn't, but maybe I'll send him like
some baby booties. Now, Oh, there you go, because made
(17:48):
of muffets, baby booties. All right, So these things have
to be functional because people work in them. Big business
runs out of these things. Important things happen, and much
like when we were designing our second floor, it's not
as easy as just boom, there's a second story. When
(18:09):
we were working with our local architect, he was like, well,
you gotta get up there. And that's when it first
hit me of the problem. What wait, what did he
mean by that? You have to be able to access
the second story. So that's when it really hit home
the problem of stairs. And he was like, no one
ever thinks about it. And he said that's usually the
biggest issue when designing, like a second floor build on
(18:32):
an existing home is that you've got to fit stair somewhere.
In the case of skyscrapers, those stairs become elevators. Right,
which you don't think about it at all. And yeah,
it's you would not have skyscrapers if you didn't have elevators,
and it just so happens that they coincided at about
(18:52):
the same time. Yeah, I think in New York a
department store in eightifty seven was the first passenger evader.
It was an Otis brand elevator. That's great, was it really? Yeah? Yeah,
I think built by Elijah Otis himself. I love that.
I'm pretty sure it's a him. I'd feel really terrible
(19:13):
if that was, like, like the inventor of the elevator
was a woman and I didn't know it. You know,
I agree for shame. I guess the h makes it
a him. If it was Eliza Otis, then it'd be
a woman. But Elijah Otis is the man's version of
that probably so okay, but we'll check on that. Uh
and if we're wrong, then we will have re recorded
(19:34):
that and you will never know. But this elevator is
it points out this article is very plainly like it's
a balancing act, like you need to get you can't
have a lobby full of people standing in line for
fifteen minutes because you don't have enough elevators, but then
elevator chefts take up a lot of room in the building.
So you've got to do the math and figure out
(19:56):
the perfect little balance between how many people can we
have in this office tower and how many elevators do
we need to get them there in due time? Right?
And so first of all, we talked about elevators in
our elevators episode. Great episode if you remember correctly. Um,
but when you add elevators, you're taking up valuable real estate, right, Like,
(20:17):
that's just a place where you can't put in office
because you've got an elevator shaft going there. So if
you want to make your money back on the that
real estate, you got to add more floors. But if
you have more floors, you have more people. If you
have more people, you need more elevators. So they're an
architect to do, right. You just go home for the day.
Elijah O just by the way, either a magnificently bearded
(20:40):
woman or an actual man. Good okay, remedia update. Yeah,
and look at the hair too. He's basically got my haircut,
except it's a little wavier on the sides. Nice. So
we couldn't have skyscrapers without elevators. Apparently, think five or
(21:00):
six floors is about the max you would want to
not have an elevator in. And this is all before
the American with Disabilities Act, right, So just just from
just logistically speaking, you couldn't go more than five or
six floors, So we've got elevators. There's also another innovation
that had to happen, and that was with um like
fire sprinklers, which those came surprisingly late for a lot
(21:25):
of commercial buildings, like there are a lot of hotel
fires up until the early nineteen eighties that killed a
lot of people before they finally mandated that you need
sprinklers in these things because it's ridiculously dangerous to not
have fire sprinklers. But with the advent inspired fire sprinklers,
it made buildings a lot, a lot safer um and
(21:48):
that was one thing that you want to have in
a high rise or a skyscraper because it's really it
takes a while to get downstairs during a fire, so
you just want the fire to be put out so
you can get back to work. Yeah, and then the
final little piece of that puzzle of design is uh too,
it should be a place people want to be in
(22:08):
an office they want to work in within reason, so
the comfort of the occupants is a big deal. Um,
when they designed the Empire State Building, they wanted to
make sure that no one would ever be more than
fifty sorry, thirty feet away from a window, which is
a nice a nice thing to do. It is because sunlight,
(22:29):
everyone knows, reaches thirty two ft. So there you get.
And did you uh did you see? Did you look
up this commerce bunk in Germany? No? I didn't, I
did not. It's really lovely. They have all these indoor
gardens and it's just gorgeous. It's like a place that
you look at and you think and you know it's
(22:50):
not they're not silk plants. They're real trees and things.
Oh yeah, it is beautiful. I love that, Like, I
just love that about buildings that have like indoor straight
up like gardens. You know, there's, um, there's one I
can't remember where it is, somewhere in Dunwoody that has
like waterfalls and stuff like that and trees going in there.
(23:14):
Like I always appreciated embassy suites because they usually I
don't think they do anymore, but they used to have
like whole like gardens and stuff in the in the
lobby and everything. There's just something about a garden inside
a house or a building that says like we own
you nature, you know, wonderfully oppressive thing. Maybe that's what
(23:36):
I appreciate about it. What's the one in Atlanta with
the great interior atrium. I don't know, Oh, the Marriott Marquis. Yeah,
the one with the elevators. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Marquis. Yeah.
I mean it's still I can't remember. It is a
pretty famous architect and designer who I think passed away
(23:56):
within the last year or so. Yeah, and that's one
of the great And there are a lot of good
plants in there too, But that's one of the great
sort of retro interior atriums that I've seen. Yeah, it's
got that great like mod feel to it. Um. It's
just it's a good, good building. I wonder who did it.
I can't remember. Um. I remember though, being in when
(24:18):
I was a I believe a senior in high school.
That was where the party was on New Year's Eve
and they, you know, somehow rented rooms to a bunch
of seventeen year olds throughout the building. Yeah, that's dangerous
and it was dangerous like for real, Like I remember,
I remember hugging the only covered part was the very
(24:38):
like you had to kind of hug the wall and
you had a at a lip that you could walk under,
and I remember walking under there and seeing televisions and
potted plants like smashing on the on the floor from
idiot children off the balconies. That is so dangerous. Oh
my god. They changed. That was like the last year.
(25:00):
They had a big policy shift after that. That's like
the Lord of the Flies. It was, I mean, my
friends and I we were I mean I didn't drink
in high school, but all my friends were. But we
were all like, man, we're getting out of here. This
is bad news. So we were good kids. Good for you, buddy.
By the way, it was John C. Portman Jr. Who
(25:22):
was the architect. Nice work, all right, Chuck. Now we
come to it might be my favorite, if not second
favorite part, which is what wind does to a skyscraper
take it away? So when does some crazy stuff to
a skyscraper the end it blows on it. Yeah, actually
(25:44):
it does crazy stuff. So like the when when when
wind encounters a skyscraper, a skyscraper will sway. Okay, that's
actually Okay, they have designed skyscrapers taking into account really
heavy gusts of wind, and the building is almost certainly
not going to fall down. There's actually this really great
(26:06):
New Yorker story from the nineties about a it's called
the fifty nine Story Crisis, and it's about the City
Corps Center, which in eight opened and after it opened,
basically the architect or the engineer realized he like didn't
carry a one or something like that, and that the
(26:26):
whole building was in danger of collapsing fully occupied now,
and that there were there were hurricanes headed toward New
York that had just the kind of wind that could
knock this building down. So they did like this emergency
retro like um like support structure addition, like they carved
(26:47):
out the interior walls and just started working on it,
and they managed to save the building for so the
dampers different. This was like they added like basically extra rivets.
He went cheap on the river, It's or something like that. Well,
I did think it was funny. In the article it said,
you know one thing you can do is just simply
tighten up the rivets and things. Right, I'm like, when
(27:08):
do you go? May I feel like it's tight enough. Well,
so I think, right, more than perfectly tight. Right. I
think they're saying, if you add more rivets and more places,
it'll it'll make the building stronger, and and um, it won't.
It won't um strain underneath the wind. The problem is
(27:32):
is what you've just done is create like a very
solid pole, and just with any kind of pole, when
it sways, the end of it, like a fishing pole,
is the part that bobbles the most. Right, same thing
with the skyscraper. So the upper floors are really and
they they're subject to sway from the wind. Again, they
(27:52):
usually except for this city Corp thing, they usually account
for this stuff and then something. But the problem is
humans get really freaked out, and not just like psychologically,
like on a primal level, get really freaked out when
we're high up and we start moving and we're not
we're not under it's not under our control. So like
(28:16):
the building might be sound, but if word gets out
from people that that it sways, people will think it's
not sound, and so you'll never sell the upper floors,
you'll never run out the upper floors, and maybe the
whole building will be stayed away from because people will
think it's going to collapse at any moment. So because
of this rumor, mill engineers actually designed for the most
(28:37):
sensitive people, um, who I think can sent something like
fifteen milli ges. So a G is like a force
of acceleration, which is actually what you're sensing when you're
swaying somewhere, like in the top of a building. This
is fifteen thousands of one G. Right when you're on
a roller coaster, you're experiencing like three four five g's
(29:00):
is fifteen thousands of one G. And that's what they
designed for. Because beyond that, they found people will start
complaining and then word might get out to the buildings unsound,
like bring more in here. He's a real whimp. Yeah,
exactly what do you think more? Oh right, Okay, tighten
it up, everybody. But tight tightening it up only goes
(29:21):
so far, right, Um, If the taller you get, tightening
doesn't help. So you've got to add other stuff. They
come up with some pretty ingenious stuff for that. Yeah,
Like in the sort of I guess what I would
call the Middle period, like empire state building period, they
started just around that elevator shaft in the middle just
trusting that up with more beams, diagonal beams, and then
(29:43):
more recently they've just built these huge concrete cores right
in the center of the building. But that's not the
coolest part, is it. No, the dampers the coolest part,
or the mass tune damper. I think, yeah, you're tuned
mass damper. I'm sorry, and I think we' talked about this.
It must have been in the nine eleven memorial. Yeah,
(30:03):
I think so. But this is one of those things
that again it seems like, whoa, they're getting really complex
because they're using computers and things now, but at its root,
tuned massd amper system is also super rudimentary, don't you think, Yeah,
it really is. So like if the building swaying one way,
they'll put like a huge like concrete disc on top
(30:26):
of some oil or something so it can slide, and
they'll move that the opposite way. So it's like, you know,
how like if you're walking a tight rope or on
like a train track or something like that, and you
start to sway one way like you're gonna fall off,
you shift your body's weight the other way and you
managed to stay upright. This is the same thing but
with the building going one way, the concrete disc goes
(30:48):
the other way, and the building sway is kept within
an acceptable limit. Yeah, I mean, it's it's amazing that
someone just said, what if we what if we swung
a big weight up there to interact this way? And
you know, it gets a little with you know, hydraulics,
and the computer is actually is what's what's monitoring the
wind and operating this thing. So that's where it gets
(31:10):
a little complicated. But at its root, it's just like
like again like a kid said, well, why don't you
just do this right? And so so there's some that
use like the huge concrete weight. Some will use enormous
gallon like um vats of water to slash back and
forth against this way. Um there's this stuff called magnet
(31:31):
or heological fluid, which changes from a solid It's normally
in a solid state, and then when you pass a
magnetic field over it, it just instantly turns to fluid.
So they have some dampers and some buildings. I don't
know if it's actually in use or not, or if
it's still proposed, but on each floor towards the center
of the building, you'll have a damper made of this
(31:52):
stuff in like a vat, and then when like say,
an earthquake is detected or some sort of seismic ac
ativity is detected, it'll trip a magnet that runs a
magnetic field over these things, and all of a sudden
they turn into liquid and they start slashing the opposite
way and keep the building from swaying too far too
(32:13):
All right, well, that's not rudimentary. No, it's not. That's magic,
that's voodoo. It is pretty pretty much. Should we take
a break, I think? I think so, man, all right,
well we'll talk a little bit about design right after this. Okay, chuck,
(32:50):
So we're on the design now, by the way. Yeah,
And the earliest ones were basically like, look at the
size of this building I built, and everyone said, well,
it's ugly as sin, And the architect and an engineer
and the builder and the owner would say, it doesn't matter.
It's taller than any of your buildings. And everyone would say,
that's that's true. But as as billings got taller and taller,
(33:13):
and like a new one went up every few months
or a few you know, every year, and some of
the city's um around the world, like New York London
those two, Um, like, it became a lot more um
important what the building looked like. Yeah. So, I mean
(33:34):
in the twenties and thirties into the forties with what
one of my favorite movements, the Art Deco movement. Love it.
You get my favorite building, which is the Chrysler Building, uh,
and the Empire State Building, which is still just gorgeous
to look at. You know. So when we're in New Zealand,
if you have time, there's a town there called Napier
(33:54):
and it got leveled by an earthquake in n and
they said, well, we're gonna rebuild the town. What's like
the current um trend in architecture. Oh, it's Art Deco.
So it's an Art Deco town. The town is it's gorgeous. Man,
it's all in like pastels and everything is just a
(34:15):
beautiful town from the nineteen thirties that they just rebuild
all all Art deco. Um. So you know that was
that rang true for a while, but then eventually you know, like, um,
you know, architecture goes and trends, and we had a
bad trend in the nineteen sixties. And in Atlanta certainly
has its share of international style buildings that is what
(34:37):
it's called, which I don't know why, but for some reason,
they sort of just reverted back to these monoliths. Uh
and and a lot of them were torn down Atlanta,
but some of them are still here and they're just
they're the ugliest buildings in the city. I like some
of them, like not necessarily the ones in Atlanta, but
like the Sears Tower, the Willis Tower is is an
(35:00):
international style. Yeah, the un interesting at least because it's staggered, right, Okay,
that's still technically international style. UN Headquarters in New York
International style. Some of them can have a retro style, now, right,
I think that's what I appreciate about something. But yeah,
you're right, and some of them are also just like that.
It's just fuggle. Yeah you know. Uh and this year's
(35:23):
are Willis Tower. We still call it this Year's tower.
Let's be honest. Um, that one is unique in that
it is uh it's it's tubes, right, yeah, and they're
staggered in height. So they kind of played with this
new thing for um. I think I don't know if
it was for the skeleton or what, but they built
(35:44):
like steel tubes and then fill them with concrete, so
that provided the structure. But they they they staggered them,
so it created this cool look to the building that
it's known for. Yeah. I did the Architectural River tour
in Chicago when I was there last summer, and the
lady we had was great and she told us the story.
I just couldn't remember it quite right. Yeah, it is
(36:06):
the Series Tower. I feel bad for Mr Willis, but
it's it's just the Series Tower. Um. And then you've
got now kind of like like whatever, whatever you want
to do, that's that's what we want. Like in some
some are great, some are not so great. But I
(36:28):
think that's always been the way with skyscrapers. Some are great,
some are not so great. But either way, you've got
a big old sky scraper in your city now, whether
you like it how it looks or not. Yeah, they're
getting kind of funky, like in a place like New
York where it's um like even one uh is it
one World Trade Center now of the Freedom Tower? Oh right,
(36:50):
but I believe they call it one WTC still as well,
now is it? I don't know, Well, it's just called
the Freedom Tower. We'll call it one World Trade Center.
You're right, um that one fits in even though it
has a newish look, but it fits into the landscape
because it's there's a lot of tall buildings in New York.
When you see like sometimes in the Middle East, like
(37:12):
in Um although Dubai has got a lot of tall
ones now or Malaysia, there will be so much taller
than the surrounding buildings that it's just sort of odd
looking to me. Well. Plus also, you know, you you
hope that the architect is going to design the thing
to fit the surroundings rather than really stand out. And
(37:35):
but regardless, I mean, these are not public buildings. These
are privately owned buildings almost across the board, and you,
the city dweller who lives there and has to look
at this thing every day, are totally at the mercy
of the person designing it. Like that's that's whatever gets
put up gets put up, and you had no say whatsoever.
And um, which can be good in a lot of cases,
(37:56):
it can also be bad. Um, but there are it
seems like more often than not, the stuff that they're
putting up these days is pretty pretty interesting to look at.
Like there's um zahahidid who I think when the prints
cure prize a couple of years ago, and I think
she died. Recently, she put up this um building. I
(38:17):
don't know if it's done yet or not, but it's
called one thousand Museum Tower in Miami, and it is gorgeous.
It's super Miami, like the exterior skeleton actually twists and
curves and they snakes around the outside of the curtain
wall even in some points. But it fits like it
fits Miami. Like you just look at this building, You're like,
(38:40):
I can't imagine that building anywhere else in the world,
or more at home anywhere else in the world that Miami.
So it's good. Like it's neat, it's interesting, it's it's
cool to look at, but it also fits the surroundings, Yeah,
for sure. And you know that one. I just looked
at it. It's that's pretty cool looking. It looks uh
some of them are looking very futuristic. Now me, that
(39:00):
looks very futuristic. Yes, yeah, which is uh, you know,
it's fine. I'm kind of I like the throwback style,
but uh, I don't mind a little future every now
and then. The question of how high can you go
is very hotly debated. Some designers and architects say, if
you had enough money, you could go a mile high.
(39:23):
Other people say, no, you probably couldn't. Um, it's not
very feasible, at least not now. Yeah, but in the future,
you know, And they say this is an efficient way
to builds up and environmentally friendly is to go up, right,
it is? It depends, It depends. Did you read that
(39:43):
one article about glass. Yeah, so that's that's pretty hotly
debated right now in the architectural community. Huh yeah. I
don't know if they're trying to start it up or
if it is actually already a thing of debate. But
there are some architects, some pretty prominent ones too, who
said we should stop like building glass towers. They're kind
(40:04):
of cold, they're unfeeling, they just don't create a sense
of community. Plus they're super wasteful, like they're really expensive
and consume a lot of energy to um heat and
cool because there's a lot of um loss of heat
and a lot of heat creeping in depending on the
time of the year, and they're just kind of wasteful actually,
(40:27):
And that coupled with the idea that there's now this
trend moving toward tearing down taller and taller buildings and
replacing them with even taller new skyscrapers, especially when there's
really nothing wrong with that skyscraper in the first place.
But say, like in in Chicago, if the Willis family
(40:48):
had known that they were their their tower was still
going to be known as the Sears Tower, no matter what.
They may have torn that thing down and built something
else in its place, right, And that seems to be
the trend. It's like, oh, that'll always be known as
you know this, this this building. I want to tear
it down and put up my own building that is
super duper wasteful. And there's those are two big criticisms
(41:11):
as far as skyscrapers are going right now, um in
the world from what I can understand. Yeah, that one
article you since said that to seventy Park in New
York will be the first building taller than two hundreds
to be demolished, and that the average lifespan. There was
a study from the the Council on Tall Buildings and
(41:31):
Urban Habitat that found the average lifespan of the one
hundred tallest demolished buildings is forty one years. That is,
that is not long enough for the amount of expense
that goes into them, the amount of materials and energy
you like, I think that same article says like these
things should be built for a hundred to two hundred years.
(41:52):
I mean, what is it a football stadium? Basically, Yeah,
they don't even have forty one years. You could me
fourteen fifteen years now, Yeah, I think about it. Man.
So like the with the Brave Stadium, the ted was
like built nine for the Olympics and it's it was
abandoned two years ago and two so it made it
(42:14):
um twenty years, twenty years and it's being used now.
Georgia State took it over. But it was a perfectly
good baseball stadium fifteen minutes from my house. And then
with the Falcons Stadium, that one there was nothing wrong
with that one. Was there the Georgia Dome Yeah uh no.
But I gotta say, man, that new Mercedes Been Stadium
(42:35):
is it nice? Man, it's awesome. I haven't been in
it yet. It's very cool. It feels like you're at
an outdoor game, even with the roof closed. Oh cool.
The way they built it, it's just you should check
it out at some point. I mean, it is beautiful,
Like I get that it's not lost on me. I'm
not just such a like a a grump or a
critic that I'm just like, no, it doesn't matter, Like
(42:56):
I get that. There's also a lot of like civic pride,
especially that goes into a building like that. Yeah, but
it's also super wasteful. We'll just tear something down while
it's still totally fine rather than renovating it. And of
course all the controversy for especially for sports stadiums, around
tax dollars paying for them, even though it's usually a
hotel tax, so they can say like it's not on you,
(43:18):
it's on the people that come to Atlanta. Yeah. I
don't know if they did that in Cobb County. I
think it was a straight up like citizens tax. I
think so for the baseball one. Um. You also send
a cool article though about wood skyscrapers and how this
is a new trend and apparently ahead of schedule. Brock
(43:38):
commons a student Uh, like, I guess it's a dormitory
at University of British Columbia is now the tallest as
of now the tallest wooden uh structure at eighteen stories. Yeah,
and you think, like, well, would that's not good? We
don't want to start using wood for sky screen is good.
Apparently it is good that it that it can it
(44:00):
can be sustainably sourced UM and that it can actually uh,
it uses like in some cases less UM energy than
creating a skyscraper using concrete and steel UM. And that's
not including like transport costs or transport emissions as well.
(44:22):
That's strictly in production UM. And that the stuff they're
making or using that's called cross laminated timber, which supposedly
is as strong as steel. The big drawback to it
is like twice the price, right now. Yeah, it's just
a it's it's like what you get with like press board.
It's it's sheets of wood glued together and compressed together.
(44:44):
And when you look at this brock Commons, it just
you know, looks like a ordinary building. And there's another
building going up somewhere in Japan I couldn't find where.
It's called the W three fifty building, which I guess
stands for wood and it's tall, which is that's a
that's like a thirty five story skyscraper made of wood
and I think ten percent steel, but the rest is
(45:05):
would UM. And that's going to be really something and
I imagine a pretty big proving ground for you know,
this this new material. Yeah, and you mentioned that it
is can be sustainable and uh, because the first thing
I thought of, of course, is like, now we're going
to tear it on the forest to build buildings. But
they say that less than one percent of the world's
(45:26):
forests are harvested each year. Um. It sounds like a
hornets nest to me. It does. But you know, they
did this in Canada and they said it was a
super green project and like the way forward. And I
trust the Canadians on that stuff, me too, man. Um,
So like we just would be the worst human beings
(45:46):
alive if we didn't talk about the tallest buildings in
the world and the competition for it. Yeah. And also
real quick, you mentioned the glass didn't what didn't they
have that one building in London that like melted a car? Yeah,
the walkie talkie building. Yeah, that was one of the
problems with glasses. Um. Do you remember And when we
were in Buckhead, the sovereign building next door. Yes, if
(46:06):
did you ever walk past it and through the beam
of light it was blinding. It was really hot too.
You could imagine like under certain circumstances, it could like
burn you. Well, there's a building in London that they
had to share it even further because it melted a
car that was parked in that beam of melted a car. Yeah,
loy alright. So the tallest, I mean it's I think
(46:30):
they said there's something like twenty buildings under construction that
will eclipse the Birge Khalifa. Oh is that right? Wow?
And is I think that's currently number one undisputed. But
the the Jettah Tower j E D D A H
in Saudi Arabia will be three thousand, two d and
(46:51):
eight feet high and that will be done in just
a couple of years. Yeah, that's that's over. It's a
thousand meters I think on the nose if I'm not
mistake it. And this is one sticks out like a
sore thumb too, It definitely does. Um. And then there's
also one that might be the tallest for a brief
time because I think it's going to be uh completed
(47:12):
before the Jetta Tower. But it's in Dubai and it's
called the Tower, and it'll be nine eight meters or
three thousand and forty five ft. That's that's I mean,
I know they say it's good to go up, but
I don't know. That stuff makes me nervous. There's a
picture of the Jetta Tower to where a substantial portion
of it, maybe the top third, is above the cloud lines,
(47:37):
and it's like, yeah, it's it wouldn't necessarily be like
that every day, but theoretically, if that's even possible, I
can't imagine how much like those upper floor pent houses
are going to go for. It's just nuts, man, but
they're building them that. I think the tower in Dubai
is expected to cost a billion dollars, which I'm like,
(47:57):
that seems kind of inexpensive to me for a thousand
meter building. Well, I know one person who wouldn't live
at the top of that thing, and he's sitting across
from me. Yeah, I'd just like to see pictures of
it and get woozy down here at sea level. I
don't even have a high thing, and that it makes
me nervous. Yeah, I'm with you, So I guess it's
(48:17):
about it. There's well, one more thing. There's a lot
of debate over what constitutes the world's tallest building, and
the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban habitat that you
mentioned before. They said that there's actually no real definition
of a skyscraper, but there are some types subcategories. I
guess where there are definitions. There's a super tall which
(48:40):
is three or more, Mega tall which is six or more,
and then a tall building is is up to three.
But I get it doesn't there's no starting basis for it.
But there you go. Skyscraper can be anything tall, just
like in the old days of it. If you want
(49:01):
to know more about skyscrapers, uh, just start looking around.
They're everywhere and you can also read about them on
how stuff works by typing skyscraper in the search bar.
And said, so, I said, that's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this very smart lady emailed us Camilla
size or c's s I s E about Akham's razor,
(49:24):
and it's very nice about it too. Yeah, did you
read this one? She said? I thought i'd give a
small clarification uh slash correction. I'd give you some insight
on the alleged subjectivity of it. Uh. You explained that
principle was, when confronted with competing explanations, one should select
the simplest one. She said, this very common misconception. It
(49:45):
should be the most parsimonious. How about that word explanation
is more likely to be true? She said. It seems nitpicky,
but eliminates a lot of the subjectivity you complained about
in the episode. The most parsimonious means most economic in
the sense that it makes the least amount of assumptions.
That makes total sense, because each additional assumption you're making
(50:08):
is an additional chance of being wrong. For example, the
ghost and the photo makes the assumption that ghosts exists
exists something that has not been proven, whereas the naturalistic
explanation doesn't need to assume the existence of any light
phenomena you used to explain that picture because those all
have been proven to exists around that. So I feel
(50:31):
like we did talk about that a little bit, but
we weren't very explicit, and I think we kind of
walked past the idea that that's the basis of the
whole thing. Yeah, she said, as you explained very well,
it doesn't disprove the ghost hypothesis, it just makes it
less likely to be true. Most of science is not
about proving things anyway, It's about inferring the most likely
explanations to phenomena. I hope that helps keep up the
(50:54):
great work that is Camilla size and that is that
is a good email. Yeah, thanks a lot, Camilla and
well but appreciate that. And a few people wrote in
kind of saying something similar, but she definitely put it best.
If you want to set us straight, you can hang
out with us on Twitter. I'm at Josh Underscore, UM Underscore, Clark,
Chuck's at movie Crush Pod, and we're both at s
(51:16):
Y s K Podcast on Twitter. Chuck's on Facebook dot
com Slash movie Crush Pod. I actually spend a lot
of time on the movie Crush Facebook page. Okay, so
if you want to hang out with Chuck on Facebook,
go to Facebook dot com Slash movie Crush. Uh. He's
also on Facebook dot com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant
and slash s Y s K or No Stuff you
(51:37):
Should Know. I mean you're all over Facebook, aren't you. Uh.
If you want to send us all including Jerry and email,
you can send it to Stuff Podcast at how Stuff
Works dot com and as always, join us at our
home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
(51:58):
it how stuff works? Dot com
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