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mistersausage t1_jbkwgt7 wrote

There should be tall apartment housing on top of it. Low rise sprawl in center city is a waste.

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urbantravelsPHL t1_jbljgld wrote

this is the same discussion we've had about the proposed arena and whether it should also have a high rise building stacked on top of it.

The answer is that, for structural engineering reasons, you cannot stack a high-rise on top of a huge clear span roof.* A huge clear span roof has enough to do holding itself up. This is why you don't have arenas and large convention centers on the ground floor of high rise buildings.

*edit for clarity - I shouldn't speak of the convention center as having a "large clear span roof" as it certainly doesn't, in the manner that a large sports arena does. There are columns in the space. But it is still not the type of space you can easily place on the ground floors of a tall high-rise.

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I can think of a few big city hotels with quite large ballrooms as part of their meeting space, but even those are generally not right under the tall towers. (I'm thinking of the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco, where I saw Mikhail Gorbachev in 199? give a talk with alllll the ballrooms opened up and an audience of about 2000....that portion of the building is not underneath the hotel tower.)

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urbantravelsPHL t1_jblkn5g wrote

(it was may 1992 and Gorbachev was launching his foundation, which was later headquartered at the Presidio. Just had to look that up and remind myself that I'm old)

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mistersausage t1_jblqg23 wrote

That's fair, but if I recall correctly there are columns in the exhibition spaces; it's not spanned the entire width. (I haven't been in there since before the pandemic, so I could be misremembering)

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urbantravelsPHL t1_jblu1x0 wrote

Yes, there are columns in the main hall. But not of the number and type you would normally see in the skeleton of a skyscraper. Think more of the typical large parking garage underneath a tall building to picture how interrupted the space would be with columns.

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[deleted] t1_jbl4l7a wrote

[deleted]

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RexxAppeal t1_jblbik1 wrote

Comcast 2 is taller than any building in Tokyo (Tokyo skytree is much taller, but it's a TV broadcast "structure").

Comcast 1, Liberty 1 and 2 are all taller than Tokyo's 2nd tallest. Tokyo isn't actually a particularly tall city, it's more like London in that it covers a lot of land with midrise buildings, and has a few clusters of taller buildings near transit hubs.

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