
Are “landscrapers” the new skyscrapers? - prostoalex
https://work.qz.com/1146117/googles-new-london-headquarters-are-landscrapers-the-new-skyscrapers/
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IIAOPSW
I think this is a silly use of real estate. The entire point of building an
n-story building is you get to multiply your usable land area by n. Those who
point to tall down-towns are right. A built up city has more land area than
the map would suggest and can thus fit more people and more activity. Even
better is the fact that a single utility link (electric, gas, sewage) to an
n-floor building does the same work as n links to n 1-floor buildings. Its
just more efficient.

I get the complaints about having to travel by elevator all the time and not
having as much ground level community. Which is why I don't understand why
sky-ways never became popular. There's no technological reason you couldn't
have an interconnected upper level with shops and public/commercial space.
Perhaps its just a problem on getting all the different developers and
governments to agree on the standards for a modular interconnected second
level.

~~~
bane
One of the problems with tall buildings, especially super-tall ones, is the
amount of interior that gets eaten up by non-usable infrastructure and
support. For example, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai occupies about 17 acres (just
under 7 hectares), while offering about 3.6 million square feet of interior
floor space (about 83 acres or about 33.5 hectares) for a ratio of
space:footprint that's < 5.

This means that if they simply occupied all the land and went up for 5 floors
they'd have more floor space.

Example, the Pentagon in the U.S., with 5 floors and 6.5 million square feet
has more usable square footage than the Burj, the tallest building in the
world.

~~~
Eridrus
Burj Khalifa is not a utilitarian building, and clearly an outlier, so I don't
really see why you would use it as an example except to mislead people. The
Empire State Building which was mentioned in the article has 2.7 million
square feet of office space built on 80k square feet of land.

~~~
bane
It's an optimization problem. As buildings get taller and taller more and more
of the interior space gets taken up by support framework, transportation and
utility service bits. The Burj Khalifa is notable because it's also a case
where in order to construct a building of its height, the _shape_ of the
supporting infrastructure of the building is also fundamentally compromised
such that there's less usable interior per unit height.

The Pentagon is interesting as a building because it was put up very quickly
and remains one of the largest buildings by usable square footage in the
world. But of course it's not a raw optimization. There's a 5+ acre center
courtyard that's non-structural and each part of the pentagon is composed of 5
concentric "rings" with space between them for natural light to get into the
building. Despite this, it's still a more efficient use of land acreage vs.
the Burj.

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ACow_Adonis
No offense, but this is clearly a marketing fluff peice.

It looks like every other mid-rise commercial building development.

Is it the future? Absolutely, if by future, you mean the 80's, but everything
is shiny and labeled with the adjective "smart" for some reason.

Almost as innovative as Apple's relabelling of the suburban office/business
park.

When the hell did everything become marketing...

~~~
candiodari
Yep, this is a Google overseas investment/tax dodge. Everything else about the
building is secondary at best, for both Google and frankly, for the rest us
too.

[https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/18/3889818/google-
relocates-...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/18/3889818/google-relocates-uk-
headquarters-to-kings-cross-london)

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xversilov
The only reason this is a "landscraper" and not a 50 story building is because
of land use regulations, namely, London's height limits.

Asia, unburdened by the West's ridiculous land policies, is skyscraper heaven.

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crazygringo
Google's NYC building (111 8th Ave) is 790 ft long -- not as long as the new
one's 1,082 ft, but still comparable. Few people realize it's NYC's fourth-
largest building, since it's only 15 stories. [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_Eighth_Avenue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_Eighth_Avenue)

~~~
frik
Google's 111 8th Ave NYC building completed in 1932, at 2.9 million square
feet (270,000 m2), it is currently the city's fourth largest building in terms
of floor area as of 2014. It was the largest building until 1963 when the
3.14-million-square-foot (292,000 m2) MetLife Building opened.

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maxxxxx
This doesn't seem a good idea. I don't think cities should sprawl even more.
Even Silicon Valley would probably be better off if they had built up instead
of all the one or two level office parks.

~~~
II2II
It would depend upon many factors. Height restrictions are one of them. There
are social, environmental, and engineering considerations on that front.
Current land use practices are another. It may be possible to gain tremendous
boosts in density even with mid-rise buildings. Then there are the diminishing
returns to land use while building up since you are talking about many
independent structures that require a certain amount of separation.

These buildings are by no means sprawling office parks. They are simply the
realization that horizontal may be better than vertical in some cases.

~~~
arebop
Monoliths are problematic. They're dull, they're poorly connected, they're in
the way. It's worse when they're arranged horizontally because people tend to
move horizontally. When you build up, the problems mostly develop for the
people inside your building. When you build across, you obstruct everyone
around you.

How are these "landscrapers" different from sprawling office parks? The key
difference I notice is that the plan doesn't include an ocean of parking
(which admittedly is a big part of why office parks are terrible).

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BoiledCabbage
This is really no different than existing low story construction except
connect the building instead of leaving them unconnected. If anything it's
worse since there is now now variety at all, and enormous multiple blocks of
sameness.

Part of what makes old-school cities so pedestrian friendly was having a
variety of small shops to stop in. A bakery, grocer, butcher, clothing store
all only a few windows wide. This is like building an enormous Home Depot,
Costco and Circuit City in the middle of downtown. This does not make a
pedestrian friendly city.

~~~
flukus
Doesn't a good portion of London (where this is built) already have whole
blocks of low rise terraced housing? The only difference seems to be more
holes in the wall and less doors.

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curtis
"Landscrapers" will (obviously) have fewer, but larger floors. For certain
types of organizations (e.g. software development organizations) this can be a
real advantage, since more of the people that each person needs to work with
can be on the same floor. Being separated by even a single floor can make a
remarkably big difference to communication.

~~~
klenwell
Interesting point. Reminds me of one of the major arguments in Jared Diamond's
Guns, Germs, and Steels as to why the Old World conquered the New and not
vice-versa.

Eurasia is a "landscraper" (oriented longitudinally) allowing for easier trade
and exchange of innovations (especially related to agriculture and animal
domestication) along a broad expanse of land.

The Americas are a skyscraper (more latitudinal orientation) with greater
diversity of climate and topology that impeded the spread of some innovations
and technologies.

~~~
jcranmer
Jared Diamond's thesis (rather like I feel the skyscraper/landscraper thesis
is) is quite overstated. The climatic zones running from Mesopotamia to China
are quite varied, and there's rather little evidence for technology transfer
between these two endpoints. By contrast, the climatic zone from the northern
edge of the Valley of Mexico to the boreal forests in Canada is basically one
smooth temperature gradient, and we do know of rather extensive trading and
tech transfer in North America (particularly, the introduction of maize to the
independently-developed agriculture quite revolutionized developments in
eastern North America). Not to mention the fact that the Americas don't seem
so far behind Eurasia the more we do the archaeology: Norte Chico is now dated
to at least 3200-3500 BC, a date competitive with Ancient Egypt and not too
far behind Sumeria in terms of developing civilization.

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curtis
I was imagining a giant hole in the ground, but low, very long buildings are
no doubt more practical.

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bastijn
Why is it an era of landscapers when Google builds it but not even thought of
when it is a regular shopping mall? Plenty of shopping malls with these sizes
around the world. Also build as one long “landscraper”. I would say
landscapers are already there for many years, just not by a fancy company.

You build skyscrapers in locations where ground is scarce and expensive, you
build landscapers in locations where it is the opposite. In dense areas with
high ground prices you accept the building cost overhead, in other areas you
go for cheaper building costs and accept the increased price on land (as
compared to a skyscraper at the same location).

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agoodthrowaway
I don't think the author is familiar with the Merchandise Mart in Chicago nor
the Frank Gehry design of Facebook's new mega building (to cite 2 well known
non US govt. examples).

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quickthrower2
It's a "campus". That sure sounds cooler than "commercial office space".

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seanmcdirmid
Reminds me of ibm’s old boca raton campus (where they invented the PC and did
OS/2 with MS). You could walk for a few hours down those corridors, it was
just one long 3 or 4 story building, or at least that’s how it felt.

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bitwize
No, because skyscrapers are tall. They allow you to get a lot of working space
out of relatively little of Earth's surface area. This thing doesn't offer
anywhere near that sort of surface-area economy. They could get away with
putting it in London, because London. Elongated buildings are commonplace in
London, apparently because of local laws. If Google wants to build in a place
where land surface area is precious -- downtown Manhattan, say, or any city in
Japan -- it'll be hard to beat the good old skyscraper.

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gnode
I think the crucial technology which would make such cities practical in the
future would be innovation in transportation, whether that be something like
lateral elevators for short distances (of course "elevate" may be a misnomer
here), or hyperloop for longer distances. Building vertically has the benefit
of squeezing more utility out of land area, but has drawbacks which can make
city life less comfortable.

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junkscience2017
I love it. We do not live on Coruscant, space is not at such a premium even in
London or NYC that you must push higher and higher. Skyscrapers are sterile;
nothing happens at street level. The entire purpose is to isolate. The
landscrapers have a more humane elevation and will end up creating entire
neighborhoods.

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slowandlow
This style of architecture definitely allows for more sunlight and doesn't
dirty the skyline with nasty highly reflective glass. Sometimes you're located
in an area that is better without skyscrapers. Although I'm sure most of the
posts here will be about "inefficiency".

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dade_
All the amenities made possible with high density but also convenient to take
the stairs... Its a wonderful thing after living on the 33rd floor for many
years. Interesting to see how this works out.

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King-Aaron
> From some angles, it may resemble a landlocked cruise ship.

\- Does not look anything like a cruise landlocked cruise ship.

~~~
Animats
This, Sea World in Shenzhen, [1] is a mall built to look like a landlocked
cruise ship. Google's building is not.

The U.S. Government used to build office buildings a few stories high but huge
in length. The Pentagon is the most notable example, but there were many
others built in the 1940s through the 1960s. They were built sturdily and
cheaply, like parking garages.

[1] [https://youtu.be/NTcx0OHehdE?t=35](https://youtu.be/NTcx0OHehdE?t=35)

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WalterBright
I wonder about the fire issues. I'd rather have two buildings with a gap to
act as a fire break.

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meh2frdf
It’s just a normal looking building for that area, or am I missing something?

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ukulele
Does this "landscraper" have the horizontal equivalent of an elevator (i.e.
something where you push a button and it moves you anywhere horizontally in
~20 seconds)?

It seems like that might knock you over, but maybe there's a fun workaround
(or just seats I guess).

~~~
MikeTheGreat
From the article:

"Future employees might move around landscrapers on elevators that zoom back
and forth laterally, not only up and down, she notes. That technology already
exists in Germany, where ThyssenKrupp has recently sold the first elevator
that can move up, down, sideways and diagonally—controlled by magnetic
levitation—to a residential building in Berlin."

~~~
dsr_
Why would you do something so bizarre when we have perfectly good conveyor
belts, as used in most major airports?

~~~
flukus
Conveyor belts are slow. They realized long ago that you can't accelerate a
standing human too fast and that stepping on to a conveyor belt takes you to
max speed nearly instantly. Any faster and people need a running start to jump
on.

~~~
lostapathy
Solved problem. There are actually moving sidewalks that accelerate you as
they go, see [https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/accel-moving-
sidewal...](https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/accel-moving-sidewalk-
thyssenkrupp-dream-come-true.html)

Somewhere I saw a prototype of a multi-belt system as well. You get on a
shorter one at normal speed, and you can either transition to one moving twice
as fast as the first, or you can step off completely. The speed difference
from stationary to slow is the same as from slow to fast - you just accelerate
by shifting belts.

~~~
flukus
The link shows the "fast" speed as being 2m/s, which is still just a brisk
walk. You'd be better off with bicycles or segways.

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menssen
Strip malls, factories, and suburban office parks are all associated with
dense, vibrant, walkable cities, so, yeah, this makes sense.

~~~
dang
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here? I'm sure many of us share your
sympathies. I probably do too, though it's hard to know for sure in the
absence of any information. None of that matters, though, because this kind of
comment just takes threads into internet brown.

We need better than this, especially early on, in order to have thoughtful
conversation.

~~~
CyberDildonics
> Please don't post unsubstantive comments here?

I don't understand your question.

