It Comes With The Territory

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban habitat has an online database of skyscrapers that’s great for poking around in. You can look for what interests you or review one of their premade lists. I found the list of the 100 Tallest Demolished Buildings to be quite interesting.

The list is, of course, headed by the old World Trade Center towers 1 and 2. They are still among the tallest ever built, and they are more than twice the height of the next tallest building on the list, which is the Singer Building (seen above). Note that the Singer Building itself was briefly the tallest in the world. It may only have had the title for a year, but a champion with a short tenure is still a champion. In any case, as you go down the entries on the list, the buildings rapidly get into the category of “yeah, it’s tall enough to be considered a skyscraper, but it’s still not very tall.” The demolition of buildings in the 20s and 30s of floors is not without interest, but it’s not dramatic.

The 9/11 attack accounts for the first, second, fourth, and seventh entires, although the Deutsche Bank Building on Liberty Street (number seven) was destroyed by the economics of repair rather than the extent of the damage it sustained when hit by debris from the collapsing WTC2. If we get skip past them, the buildings that measure 40 stories or taller that remain are:

• the Singer Building in New York, 41 stories and 612 feet, demolished after 60 years,
• the CPF Building in Singapore, 45 stories and 561 feet, demolished after 42 years,
• the Morrison Hotel in Chicago, 45 stories and 526 feet, demolished after 40 years,
• the UIC Building in Singapore, 40 stories and 499 feet, demolished after 39 years,
• and the Hennessy Centre in Hong Kong, 41 stories and 458 feet, demolished after 25 years.

All five buildings were demolished because their sites were being redeveloped with newer large buildings, which is a fairly common occurrence in dense cities with growing economies. The 40-year median age at demolition is not, in my opinion, an accident. It resents an age where significant upgrades to mechanical systems are likely to be required, and where the building is seen as old or, worse from the marketing standpoint, part of the background. In other words, skyscrapers are investments. Some of them become social icons and some of those become designated landmarks, but most do not. When you build a tall building you may be getting ready for the day when your building is added to this list.