Fantastic essay. Slightly tangential, but honestly so many new constructions with housing are just so wasteful. Luxury apartments designed to stay empty while some investor on the other side of the country owns it and waits to sell to the next sucker in line. Office buildings with extravagant and wasteful lobbies, serving no purpose other than the vanity of the developers.

Of course, we need higher density. The world can’t be split into the extravagance and waste of skyscrapers and the drudgery and repetition of the suburb sprawl.

As I type this, I’m sitting in the empty lobby of an office building. A giant corporate sculpture is hanging above the concierge desk. The empty space and high ceiling could easily fit dozens of apartments. Not even thinking about the resources spent

It’s just… A lot, when you start looking at offices and skyscrapers through this lens.

Taking example numbers from the article, but not explicitly stated, it kind of sounds like 15 floors, about 60m tall, is the point in which density starts to sacrifice ecological concerns too much.

According to a 2015 study commissioned by the CTBUH, the whole life emissions of both energy use and materials for a 120m concrete and steel structure are nearly five times higher than those of its 60m equivalent.

That’s still tall enough for many things, so I guess the rest should be handled by a bit more space use and better mass transit.