High Rise Apartments

Ever since I read Fountainhead, I fell in love with buildings. With Skyscrapers. No, my fascination with tall buildings is much older than that. Somehow, high rise buildings have caught my fancy ever since I was a kid. I remember how we kids used to look at this building in my neighborhood (14 floors high) in Mumbai with jaw dropped awe!

High rise buildings are an audacious display of dreaming big. There is this larger than life magnificence about these buildings. To quote Li Fu Tuan, they are a vertical aspiration` - the human desire to defy gravity. They represent the relentless quest of height in architecture; they are a symbolic representation of the supremacy of man. A testimony to the supremacy of man!

This blog is my paean to high rise buildings.

Some technical fundae on high rise buildings:
Skyscrapers/High rise buildings: Buildings taller than 150 m are called as skyscrapers. Even a building of 80 meters may be considered a skyscraper if it protrudes above its built environment, like the building in my neighborhood, I was talking about. And they ain’t easy to build. If Solid Mechanics as a subject boggles you, imagine what it takes to build a structure as high that. Structure, geotechnical aspects, design, material, stresses on the material, tests conducted on the slabs, compressibility of soil, construction process and pipelines, staircases, elevators. The list can stretch as long as Homer’s Odyssey!

High rise buildings were there since time immemorial. The Insulae of Roman architecture, buildings in the Roman Empire reached higher than 10 stories. The Great Pyramid of Giza, Lincoln Cathedral, Washington Monument. The skyline got closer during medieval times. Heard of the landmark Towers of Bologna in Italy? And then mankind went higher!

John Hancock Centre is huge. Yeah, huge!

And then came the super tall skyscrapers era. The age of axis mundi. Home insurance building in Chicago, American Surety building in New York, Chrysler building, Empire State building, World trade centre took us higher.
Sears building remained the highest for several decades.
From the 1930s onwards, skyscrapers also began to appear in Latin America (Caracas, Mexico City) and in Asia (Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manila, Singapore, Mumbai, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei and Bangkok).

PETRONAS towers in Kuala Lumpur are the tallest towers of the world. 88 stories HIGH!
Practically, high-rise buildings are constructed largely because they can create a lot of real estate out of a fairly small piece of land. Because of the availability of global technology and the growing demand for real estate, skyscrapers are seen as the most fitting solution to any city that is spatially challenged and can`t comfortably house its inhabitants. And it makes sense to go higher.

I shall explore in this blog, the high rise buildings of the world, India, viability of these structures, technologies, builders in India using this concept and more.