high-rise building

Yeah.

You were turning sort of turning money a lot quicker than you do in, you know, you know, in a ground up development, especially ground up high rise development.

I mean, your, your podcast, the long game, I mean, there's not much longer game than there is of, of, you know, developing from ground up a high rise condominium.

I mean, most of these projects, you know, when you, when you look at first identifying a site, right.

Um, and acquiring the site, entitling the site, designing the site,

They were doing 10 Museum Park.

I was at that same time I was doing a project, a brickle area called Brickle Emerald.

It's next door to the Jade and High Rise.

Hello.

In this episode of the A is for Architecture podcast, Professor Anthony Wood, PhD, tall building expert, professor of sustainable vertical urbanism at the Illinois Institute of Technology, author, architect, and former president and CEO of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, now the Council on Vertical Urbanism, discusses, well, very tall buildings.

The Council on Vertical Urbanism is, among many other things, the body that oversees the certification of the world's tallest buildings.

No small task, to be sure.

Tallness, as our cities now attest, is seemingly the predominant solution to almost all urban problems, from sprawl to banality to sustainability, economic growth, progressive urban identity and branding, and even the housing crisis.

Nearly 10 times as many super-talls, buildings over 300 meters, have been built since 2000 than were built in the previous 100 years.

But outside their appeal as objects, big isn't always beautiful, but it's normally very impressive.

What are they for, and how do they work as bits of a city? Anthony discusses this, where tall comes from, what it achieves as a typology, how they're made, what sort of places and cities they make, and how they could do it all a lot better.

They don't account for it that way.

So they don't understand that you have a building that's worth $100 million high rise.

That thing's depreciating on day one.

And it depreciates down to zero.

Oh, yay.

Yeah, she was just down in San Diego in July, I think.

And I toured her with a couple of the big communities we maintain, High Rise and down in Chula Vista.

But really, she was the one that got me to speak up at the two task forces right after the collapse.

[laughs]

[laughs] Well, why don't I set up some real news while you're doing that? [upbeat music] There's news that Detroit's historic Water Board building downtown is facing a major repair bill.

Outlier Media reports that the Detroit Water and Sewage Department has temporarily evacuated the nearly century-old building after routine exterior work revealed serious structural problems.

Contractors were doing tuckpointing and tile replacement when bricks began coming loose from the upper floors.

Like, if they fix it.

But let's talk about it because for one, I think it looks really cool on the skyline.

Two, uh, I wonder, is this actually the best use of this building? And three, man, having a repair bill before you even get to it, that's a pretty high, uh, bar to cross.

I mean, uh, listen, here's the thing that I'm always talking about, and people get really angry at me when I start to say stuff like this, but- Sometimes the cost of preservation is going to be bills like this.

But the reason I ended up in public service, or the way I ended up in public service, was the summer between freshman and sophomore year, My best friend from high school, he and I came to Penn together, lived in the Lower Quad and then High Rise East.

Before the High Rises had names, just directions.

That summer, I started working in my best friend's father's nightclub.

It was a discotheque.