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Old Posted Oct 1, 2011, 11:43 PM
Dense_Electric Dense_Electric is offline
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Construction of Ultratall (1000m+ ?) Buildings

So here's my story (if you don't care about the backstory, just skip down a bit): I'm working on a science-fiction project at the moment. Its current incarnation, dubbed 'The Ledyard City Chronicles,' is the latest version of what's been developing in my mind for literally the last twelve years or so (maybe longer). I might even say that the Ledyard City Chronicles is merely part of the larger universe I've created based on the whole decade-plus of imagining, but that's irrelevant for what I want to talk about here.

As you may have guessed from the title, the main setting of the story is Ledyard City, a fictional city set on the border of Michigan's upper peninsula and Montreal, Canada (downtown is on Sugar Island, to be renamed – think of it as the Manhattan of Ledyard City, with the other boroughs being Ledyard City's various wards that extend out for miles in all directions). I want to make this story believable and memorable in part by paying close attention to the details, so I'm asking for your help in figuring out something very important – building construction.

The main story is probably going to take place some time in the late 2090's/early 2100's, and I've decided that I want the average skyscrapers of the city to be somewhere around 1 to 1.5 kilometers high, the taller ones being 2 to 2.5 kilometers (maybe achieving some of that height through spires).

So, two main points of discussion:

One, do you think this is a reasonable height for late-21st century ultratall skyscrapers to reach? This story is toward the harder end of sci-fi, so I want it to be believable. Personally, I think this is a good balance between extremely tall structures and not having them so tall they just become ridiculous, but I'm eager to hear your opinion. (For the record, you can assume that titanium, carbon nanotubes, and other cutting-edge building materials and techniques are cheaper and more common than today).

Two, assuming buildings of the heights I'm discussing are reasonable, how would they be built? What might be some common features of them? Engineering challenges and solutions? Anything else you can think of? Here's a list of a few features I've devised that might be common in Ledyard City (comments and critiques welcome):

- Buildings consisting of multiple cores (maybe four or nine arranged in a square) that can play off each other by way of semi-flexible connectors to counter-act wind forces.

- Buildings built as multiple, narrow towers connected by skybridges.

- Multiple floors of liquid-filled mass dampers spaced up and down the building to counter-act wind.

- Express elevators of five, six, or seven levels and local elevators of two or three, connected by multi-story sky-lobbies so as to reduce elevator footprint size.

- All elevators would have emergency on-board power sources, and could operate independently in the event of building-wide power failure.

- At higher floors, buildings could be pressurized (and have air-locks for roof access).

So, thoughts?
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