The rise of skyscrapers

Jason M Barr presents towering buildings in a new light-as a strategic balancing act between costs and revenues to maximise profits, rather than a display of hubris

Cities in the Sky: The Quest to Build the World's Tallest Skyscrapers 

Author: Jason M Barr

Publisher:  Scribner

Pages: 384

Price: Rs 2,111

Each time crossing over the Bandra-Worli Sea link, my eyes get locked in to admire Mumbai’s skyline of towers, wrapped in glass. The history, engineering, economics, and politics of skyscrapers are fascinating. Jason Barr’s new book Cities in the Sky makes them come alive with the personalities and constraints of the people who build and use them.

Skyscrapers are a response to match the supply of valuable urban land with its demand. They perform this function handsomely. Burj Khalifa, the Empire State Building, and 22,789 other skyscrapers make similar offerings to cities around the world. Their glamour, however, hides their utility, giving a false impression that they are projects of hubris, competing to break height records. The book’s core subject is urban economics, and it guides the reader to think of floor count and building heights as problems of constrained optimisation, where building heights are a balancing act between costs and revenues to maximise profits, not hubris. It’s worth noting that all skyscrapers are ventures of profit that have brought high returns to their investors.

The book has a large scope, but a theme that keeps reappearing is the relationship between the professionals who make it happen. Collaborations between the architect and engineer need to work for the skyscraper to work. While the architect aims to break barriers on creativity and expression, engineers need to push the frontier of innovation to make them feasible. The relationship between architect Bruce Graham and engineer Fazlur Khan is a special instance in skyscraper history. They made breakthroughs that transformed construction around the world. Part of the same firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, they solved the problem of swaying buildings through steel tubes that distributed building weight to its exterior, freeing them up from the need to make columns, unlocking more floor area and making buildings more robust, at the same time. Their building, Sears Tower, held a 25-year record to be the tallest building, supplying a total floor area of 101 acres to the most valuable real-estate market in Chicago. The institutions they created continue to push frontiers. Buildings today are getting skinnier, taller, and lighter, thanks to innovations taking place across other components of a building. The author estimates that a typical skyscraper now uses half as many elevators as it did in 1980, while reinforced concrete has replaced steel completely.    

The conductor of the orchestra who delivers skyscrapers is the developer. In the author’s view, she is also the least appreciated and most misunderstood member of the team. Developers coordinate to acquire land, manage funding, gather permissions, scout architectural and engineering talent, and find tenants. Behind the scenes, they perform the most challenging function of obtaining higher floor area ratio (FAR) permits for their project. The FAR is the main regulatory instrument that allows developers to increase the space on which they can build and earn revenue. They are subtle negotiations with city governments, urban planners, and other residents. City governments use the tool to maximise the social benefit they can obtain from tall buildings. Cities differ in their friendliness towards the idea of building tall. India, for instance, is highly restrictive of building heights. Asian cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Kuala Lumpur, prefer many tall buildings, while London has mixed feelings. Chicago and New York, world leaders in building tall, have faced downturns where city governments capped building heights. Dubai, on the other hand, believes in free reign, and challenges builders to go taller than they propose.

Another great takeaway from the book is to learn about different local contexts and the nature of their negotiations. There are chapters dedicated to skyscrapers in Chicago, New York, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Dubai. The contrast in each city and its culture, through the nature of these negotiations and the character of its tall buildings, comes across brilliantly. There are master narratives of how levers are pulled to build a skyscraper in conservative London that are drastically different from incentives that make Chinese municipal leaders over eager to build very tall, very fast. Along the way, the author’s expression paints evocative pictures: “We can call Hong Kong the Mushroom City, with its mycelial network of skyscrapers bursting up from the ground and a ‘root system’ of mass transit, pedestrian walkways, escalators, and sky bridges”.

A skyscraper is a city within a city. This is a picture to unlock the imagination. Book chapters offer a view of what tall buildings look like from within. While older skyscrapers located in commercial districts dedicate space to offices, the new crop of tall buildings offers mixed-use containing shopping malls, university, and luxury hotels, sorting themselves on different floors. Asian cities, though, are a contrast that can accommodate affordable housing units in their tall buildings. At some point, ideas that influence neighbourhood diversity can guide diversity within tall buildings too. Cities in India will see more skyscrapers mushroom. Thanks to this book, they will become reasons to celebrate.

The reviewer is an urban policy researcher. He also writes SimplyCity, a weekly newsletter on urbanisation at simplycity.substack.com