Re: Question?

Joseph C Fineman (jcf@world.std.com)
Tue, 20 Jul 1999 19:15:04 -0400 (EDT)

On Tue, 20 Jul 1999, Ron Kean wrote:

> A practical problem with very tall office/residential buildings is
> that the overhead associated with servicing the upper floors takes
> up so much space on the lower floors, and costs so much, that the
> building becomes uneconomical. Many elevators must be provided, for
> example, to service a very tall building, as the occupants would not
> want to wait 40 minutes every time they want to take an elevator.

And, N.B., every shaft needed to serve an additional floor takes up space on _all_ the floors below, so that the space lost to elevators per added floor increases with the height. Eventually a point is reached where the space added by going up one more floor is canceled by the decrease in usable space on the floors below, so that nothing is gained -- *assuming* that the idea is to create usable space. If you are just trying for a height record, no expense spared, then presumably you can do at least as well as the natural relief of the earth's surface, and if you imagine another order-of-magnitude increase in the strength-to-weight ratio of the materials, then of course the sky's the limit.

||: Take it easy, but take it. :||