American Skyscapes

The first tall building I was ever in was the John Hancock Building in Chicago.  I don’t know if that left any lasting impression on me, but I’ve always been intrigued by architecture and specifically skyscrapers.  That combined with my natural inclination to see how things stacked against each other left me with the desire to rank the skylines of the United States.  

The family in the John Hancock Building in Chicago, circa 1994

 

A simple method of awarding points based on the height of a building and summing the points of all the buildings in a particular city gives that city a skyscraper score.  Ten points are awarded for a building over 1300’, 9 points for between 1200 and 1300 feet, and so on.  No points are awarded for buildings under 400’.  When the results are tabulated, the following graph results:

My hypothesis was that it would be a tight race between New York and Chicago, but that the two of them would far out-class the rest of the skylines.  I was proven half correct; I was surprised by the fact that New York is essentially in a tier of its own.  Indeed, worldwide, I would argue that only Hong Kong compares favorably with New York.  Dubai boasts the world’s tallest buildings, but doesn’t have the quantity, while Tokyo is just the opposite.  If we took the tallest building in San Francisco, the Transamerica Pyramid, it would only rank 13^th in New York.  Similarly, the tallest building in Miami would be an indistinguishable 20^th tallest building in New York.      

New York City at night.

But New York’s far from being done.  They’re currently experiencing a boom like no other city in America since New York in the late 1920’s / early 1930’s.  Just this time last year, the reigning King of New York was the Empire State Building, completed in 1931.  By 2017, it will be at the very most 5^th tallest, and could be down to 8^th if all the proposed buildings are built to their planned height.  This is a questionable assumption, so let’s just look at the construction going on in the Big Apple right now:

1. One World Trade Center – A patriotic 1776 feet tall, opened in May 2013.  It is the flagship of the rebuilt World Trade Center complex.

2. 432 Park Avenue – A slim but towering 1,398 feet, it will be one of the tallest residential buildings in the world when it opens in early 2015.  A penthouse has sold for the cool price of $95,000,000. 

3. Two World Trade Center – 1,340 feet tall.  Its slanted top reminds me a lot of the Crain Communications building in Chicago.  It will finish later this year.  For reference, the twin towers were 1,368’ tall.

4. Three World Trade Center – We showed those terrorists, right?  You knock two skyscrapers down, and we’ll put up three!  This will be 1,260 feet tall, the runt of the WTC complex, but still topping out about 6’ taller than the Empire State Building.  

The tallest building in the world from 1931 to 1970, when it was topped by the World Trade Centers, was the Empire State Building. It regained the New York crown for over a decade after 9/11.

With all those buildings currently in construction, Chicago has a lot of catching up to do.  Recently released are new plans to complete the Chicago Spire, which would be the 2^nd or 3^rd tallest building in the world if built.  

The Chicago Spire – unfortunately still only in plans.

The fact that New York has the best US skyline is hard to debate.  But, the argument can be made that it obviously should have the best skyline, as it is by far the largest metropolitan area in the country.  It consists of nearly 20 million people, and is over 50% larger than the second largest in Los Angeles.  An intriguing question that arises is which cities have the best skylines relative to their metropolitan population?

  

I didn’t have any specific expectation before I started plugging in the data, and forming hypotheses post hoc is meaningless in the best case and deceitful in the worst.  As one of my favorite professors said, it’s akin to shooting an arrow and then painting a target around where it landed.  That being said, it makes sense that Las Vegas and Honolulu are two of the biggest over-achieving cities, as they are some of the top destination spots in the world.  Likewise, DC at the bottom end could have been anticipated - the Height of Building Acts of 1910 has since limited development of a proper skyline in our nation’s capital.  One of my favorite websites since college has been Emporis, which is a worldwide building database.  I’d recommend checking it out if this post was found interesting.