View Single Post
  #27  
Old Posted Sep 5, 2007, 11:31 AM
KevinFromTexas's Avatar
KevinFromTexas KevinFromTexas is offline
Meh
 
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Austin <------------> Birmingham?
Posts: 57,327
Again, highrise just refers to a certain height for insurance and legal/safety purposes. Most likely the term wasn't even created in Texas. It's something that all cities are governed by since all structures are affected in the same way by fire and other safety hazards, regardless of where they're located. For whatever reason, for which I'm not exactly sure why, 75 feet was the magic number they went with. That may have something to do with certain things such as fire trucks only have a certain length of ladder, usually 105 feet long on the big ladder trucks.

As for skyscraper meaning building, well, that gets blurry. It certainly doesn't mean tree, although some trees really do scrape the sky, (some are well over 300 feet tall). Building refers to just about any structure that is used for a habitat of humans or that can be used for storage. Though even that gets confusing since a grain silo can store grain, but isn't used for a habitat and it normally wouldn't be seen as a traditional building. I see the word skyscraper as referring to a very tall building. Some people don't consider buildings shorter than 500 feet to be a skyscraper. And certainly when you look at pictures of New York and Chicago which are full of buildings over 500 feet, anything shorter even 300 feet tall seem short by comparison.
__________________
Conform or be cast out.
Reply With Quote