VERTICAL STREETS

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1041, 4 August 1930, Page 14

VERTICAL STREETS

GIANT CITIES CREEP UP TO CLOUDS A £12,000,000 BUILDING When we say that the modern street will be vertical and not horizontal, we are not making a statement that is open to dispute, for vertical streets ore already in existence. ) In New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and other big cities of the United States, office buildings rise hundreds of feet high, and several exceed 500 feet, while one, the Wool worth Building in New York, is nearly 800 feet, and has GO storeys. Some of these hold as many as 30,000 workers, and it is no exaggeration to say that they are vertical streets, for they contain fai more rooms, and accommodate far more businesses and workers than many a street in Loudon or Birmingham or Glasgow. But at present we are only at the beginning of the vertical street idea There is no doubt that during the next few years the buildings will become higher and higher, till at last they will tower up far above the clouds like small mountains. Already work has been commenced in New York on a skyscraper of 80 storeys that is bo rise to nearly 1,000 feet, and even taller buildings are projected. This 80-storey giant will cost altogether £12,000,000, which includes £3,200,000 for the site, and that explains why it is becoming more and more necessary to build these vertical streets. The ground in the business centres of great cities, especially those of America, is getting increasingly valuable, and only by putting up gigantic buildings capable of housing hundreds of businesses aud thousands of workers can these costly sites be fully and economically utilised.

The new' building will, when completed, accommodate 00,000 office workers, a number equal to the population of a town like Cambridge or Exeter. To put it another way: this single building would hold comfortably the whole of the combined populations of the English towns of Dorchester, Ripon, Buckingham, Devizes, Huntingdon. Totnes, Launceston, Appleby, Sandwich, Wells. Saltash, Droitwich, Richmond (Yorks), and Winchelsea.

The building will occupy a site of two acres, aud will be built in a succession of set-backs beginning at tne fifteenth storey, and finally there will be a wide tower of 50 storeys.

So far from it being an exaggeration to call a building of this size a vertical street, that is really an inadequate description. Rather should it be called a vertical town or city. The great skyscraper described has only just been started when arrangements are being made to put up an other building that will cause it to appear almost like a bungalow. Plans have already been drawn for a huge skyscraper of 150 storeys that will rise 1,600 feet above the roadway, or nearly a third of a mile high. It wij indeed be more than twice the height of the Woolwortli Building, and will cost over £15,000,000. As someone has said, it "will look down on the neigh bourlng Woolwortli Building even as now the Woolwortli Building looks down on the street.” On top of this skyscraper there is to be an airplane landing ground, and tlie tower will have 50 storeys. Will there be any limit to this erection of, vertical streets or towns? Already men arc talking of a building a mile high, but some time must certainly elapse before that becomes an accomplished fact. Apart from structural and engineering problems ami difficulties, there is the economic question whether such vast buildings can be made to pay. So important is the question that a committee of experts was recently appointed by the American Institute of Steel Construction to look into the matter. The members came to the conclusion that where the cost of the site is £4O a square foot, the best “econcmic’height” for a building is 63 storeys. The net annual return on such a building would be two and a-half times that on an eight-storey building on the same site, and a little more than on a 50-storey building. Aftet - 63 storeys the’ return would gradually get less and less as each new storey was added. If, however, the cost of the site on which the building stood was £SO a square foot, then the best return would be on a building of 75 storeys. As more storeys were added, the prolit would get less until at 131 storeys there would be no return at all on the capital invested.

The greatest problem of all, however, in connection with the multiplication of these vast buildings in a comparatively small area, is that of the traffic in tho streets. With a dozen huge buildings standing side by side or opposite to one another in an ordinary thoroughfare, no one can say what would happen to the workpeople when they poured out at five or six o’clock each day to go to their homes. A dozen buildings would mean at least 700,000 people passing into this thoroughfare at the time when offices close, and the congestion, appalling now, would be absolutely incredible. The skyscrapers are equipped with many lifts, or elevators, as the Americans call them, and some of these are express to the 20th or 30th or 40th floor, so that the whole building can be cleared of all its human population in a very short time.