Readers:

Matt Shaw, recently posted this blog on the Architizer web site. Mr. Shaw is an architecture writer, editor, etc. interested in political aesthetics, interaction design and comedy as formal generator.

Matt is the founder and co-editor of Mockitecture, a half-manifesto/half-satire collection of architectural debauchery. He has worked for the Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting (C-Lab), Storefront for Art and Architecture, and been published in Beyond, Domus, Icon, and the Architect’s Newspaper. He recently finished writing and researching the guidebook Europe’s Top 100 Architecture and Design Schools, for Domus, and helped edit Reiser + Umemoto’s O-14: Projection and Reception for AA Publications. He has been an invited critic at numerous schools including Yale University, Syracuse University and UCLA.

Visit Matt’s Mockitecture web site by clicking here.

Best Regards,

Michael

No Vacancy – Really?

Skyscrapers have long been a contest of sorts. Owners are secretive about the actual height of their buildings, so that others do not eclipse them before their time as tallest has come. The tricks that designers use to inflate tall buildings’ heights are impressive, too. Spires and decorative elements are often used to get those last few precious feet.

Image courtesy CTBUH

But underneath these shiny glass facades is another trick. A recent Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) study illustrates that big chunks of useless space are hidden at the top of many of the world’s skyscrapers in order to inflate their height. In fact, as much as one-third of a building’s height can be “vanity space.” Consider it space as decoration.

Burj Khalifa. Image courtesy Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill

The building that is set to be the world’s tallest, the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudia Arabia, set off the Council’s alarms. A case study suggested that the structure was designed with decorative, height-inflating space on top, inside of its unoccupied spire. This led the CTBUH to investigate this phenomenon in super-tall buildings, defining “vanity space” as “the distance between a skyscraper’s highest occupiable floor and its architectural top.”

Kingdon Tower. Image courtesy Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill

The current tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, has an enormous 800-foot spire that accounts for almost one-third of its 2,716-foot height. The building with the most useless decorative space is the Ukraina Hotel in Moscow. Its unoccupiable space makes up almost half, or 42 percent, of its 675-foot height. In the United Arab Emirates, we find some of the most “vain” skyscrapers, with an average of 19 percent vanity space, including the vainest super-tall, the Burj Al-Arab in Dubai, which has a useless 39 percent of its 1,053-foot height.

Burj Al-Arab. Image via www.amazingplacesonearth.com