The very essence of downtown, the skyscraper creates the silhouette of a skyline and an identity for a city.
For all its majesty and vertical economy, the high-rise office building also is a logistical nightmare when the lights go off and the elevators stop yo-yoing up and down.
But don’t expect any drastic changes in how they are built or their appeal to tenants.
The sight of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsing on themselves presents a catastrophic image to be sure, but it’s inaccurate to conclude that a high-rise is more vulnerable or more prone to fail than a low-rise.
“If you look at out last earthquake, what failed?” said Marty Borko, vice president of Santa Monica-based Gensler, a leading architecture firm. “It was the low-rise buildings. None of the high-rise structures failed.”
Local developers, architects and structural engineers said design codes and safety standards make high-rise office buildings as safe as low-rise campus buildings. Besides, an airliner-turned-cruise-missile is not the type of incident you can plan for or protect against.
The worst high-rise disaster in Los Angeles history was the 1988 fire at the 859-foot-tall First Interstate Bank of California building, at the time the city’s tallest building. A maintenance man died and 40 more people were injured in the fire that destroyed five floors and resulted in damages approaching $400 million.
The building, built in 1973, met then-current fire codes, but it didn’t have sprinklers, which were not required at the time. The blaze led to a new city ordinance requiring sprinklers in high-rises in the city.
Even so, Nabih Youssef, a structural engineer at Nabih Youssef & Associates, stressed that “we cannot build war zones in our cities. There is no reasonable or financially feasible way to defend every building from this type of event.”
An expert consultant on earthquake engineering, Youssef said that the terrorist attack would raise the bar for high-rise design standards but for one factor.
“This impact really called for a whole new standard and it’s a standard that I don’t think we can afford,” he said. “Buildings are not meant to be bunkers.”
Clifford Goldstein, a partner at developer J.H. Snyder Co., said advances in construction have reduced safety concerns.
Seismic standards have put high-rises in Los Angeles a pace ahead of those elsewhere. Buildings in the region are more likely to withstand unexpected structural shocks because they are prepared for movement of plates.
All of which begs the question : Why build so high anyway?
The high-rise mentality has its roots in various places ego, marketing, utility, community but there’s no denying that the taller a building is the more people recognize it. Still, a building’s height is no more likely to cause a fire or attract a terrorist pilot bent on suicide.
“The real answer to that is that it’s about cities and it’s about density,” Borko said. “You couldn’t build a five-story campus in lower Manhattan, that’s not what the city is about.”
Not everyone is convinced.
Jon Jerde, chairman of Jerde Partnership International Inc., which designs large-scale retail and mixed-use developments, despises high-rise office buildings. Jerde works and lives in Venice where the skyline is decidedly more horizontal than in other parts of the city.
“The skyscraper has more to do with ego and advertising than any great idea about how to use land,” Jerde said. “If you go to Tokyo, which has perhaps the highest land value of any place in the world, it is mainly five and six stories tall.”
