Economically speaking, should one look up to the businesspeople who build skyscrapers, or look down at them? Calculation is involved in reaching the answer obtained in this study: “A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Skyscrapers,” Robert W. Helsley and William C. Strange, Journal of Urban Economics, vol. 64, no. 1, July 2008, pp. 49-64. The authors explain: […]
There’s a new state of the art of disassembling — rather than “simply” dynamiting — a building tall enough to be called a skyscraper. The old, albeit seldom-if-ever-used method is shown and described in David MaCauley’s book Unbuilding. We described it here not so long ago. The new approach is a more mechanized version of […]
Muslims who live in skyscrapers must calibrate the sunset according to what floor they live on, according to a mufti, according to a report in The National: Fatwa means late iftar on top Burj Khalifa floors … In a fatwa released over the weekend, the Grand Mufti of Dubai called upon Muslims living in skyscrapers, particularly […]
The engineers who designed and built the very tallest, most skyscraping skyscrapers said very little about whether – let alone how – someone could safely disassemble such a colossus, should the need arise. About the only person who thought about it long and hard was the writer and illustrator David Macauley. Decades ago, Macauley published […]