Jayt asked about our experiences as skyscraper freaks before we found this forum in the 'how old are you?' thread. I decided it was worth kicking off a new thread.

My interest in skyscrapers came directly out of simcity 2000. I started watching every construction site I walked or caught a train past. There was a definite excitement wandering how many extra floor may be going on a building. I remember in particular that it was a quiet time in Brisbane CBD construction, with most construction sites in inner city suburbs. I was quite excited when they started to demolish the Tattersalls building on the corner of Queen and Edward and imagined they might be building a new Brisbane tallest. I was very dissapointed when the thing topped out at 4 stories - they were simply reconstructing the old building.

I found prime site in courier mail at some stage and followed that for a while. I searched the net for skyscraper stuff when I become online. I found emporis, and for a while I would check the site every few weeks, (or days) to see if something new was up. I got excited when I saw Emerald pop up as proposed, and then frustrated when it was sitting there proposed for a fair while. I eventually figured there might be something on the net about how the approval process was going and did a few google search. This led me to a new life of arguing about Melbourne vs Brisbane....

ha.

Ive always had an interest in brisbane as a city, particularly its skyline.
Always take a look at it whenever possible..

I finally decided to look into it after my school fancy dress thingie aboard 'the island' after cruising by all the buildings UC.

Found emporis, and like jellyman checked it for a long time..
before googling for some more info on brisbane.
Which lead me to a single thread in the ozscrapers ;skyscrapers and skylines' thread about brisbane. I then went all thru that subforum lookin for info about bris...

Then eventually found out that i cared about all skyscrapers not just bris.

and here i am

When I was a kid my Mum used to like going to Lennons hotel in Brisbane for the smorgasbords they did on Sunday nights. It was in the restaurant on the top floor(30), and I used to spend most of the time staring out the windows, and enjoying the view from what seemed at the time to be a huge building.

Have been interested ever since. I love historic city pictures as well, particularly from WW2 to the 70's.

In 1995 I went on a big trip with my family to New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Toronto, passing the skyscrapers with little interest. 2 years later, I found a book called Incredible Comparisons in a bookstore which showed a two page spread showing tall structures of the world side by side, and that's the day that my skyscraper interest began. I started drawing skyscrapers that night. 7 years later I'm still drawing them.

In early 1997, I began looking for skyscraper books, by 2004 I would have spent some 450 dollars on skyscraper books. In September 1997 I got the internet and the first sites I found were boomtown frankfurt (eventually morphed into skyscrapers.com) and Jeff Herzer's World's Tallest Buildings page. Dylan's webpage started around 1998 or 1999 and on New Years Day, 2000, we started a partnership with the launch of the very first Skyscraperpage.com skyscraper diagrams. About a year later, we collaborated again on the skyscraperpage skyscraper poster.

Last year some of my building diagrams were published in an issue of Popular Science (on Taipei 101). In 2003 I went to New York City, and the next year, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. As of this month I have seen 30 of the world's 200 tallest buildings, and about 55 buildings over 200 m tall.

mine came in 2002 when i went to perth and we snuck up to the 31st floor of cp. the rest is history!:D

I've always been interested in Townsville's history and future and I was searching the net one day when I came across the old OzSrapers forums at hoogbouw
http://www.hoogbouw.nl/OZforum/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi

There was quite a bit of stuff about Townsville in there because there were a couple of active forumers - I often wonder what happened to them becuase I found the new SSC forums and now I'm addicted.

These forums have opened up a whole new aspect of cities for me - the last time I was in Brisbane was January (and as you can see I joined in February) and I barely looked up the whole time - the only building I remember noticing was the 12s Magistrates Court UC because it was the view I had from my window. Now I can't wait to go to Brisbane and indeed other capital cities to see the scrapers I've been reading about.

Hey can people here from the old OzScrapers still post there - I was looking at the forums and most threads stop in 2002 but some have posts in them from 2004. A Townsville projects thread is one such example.
http://www.hoogbouw.nl/OZforum/cgi-bin/topic.cgi?forum=2&topic=478

my mother told me years ago when i was young about 5, i used to assemble blocks and build them up high to emmulate a cityscape.i lived in the burbs which were devoid of tall bldgs so i used to climb tall trees to get the 'high" feeling. When i went into Sydney for first time when i was 10 i looked up at the 100m County council bdg on george st and couldnt believe how high it was. Then i was 12 and took a trip up Austalia square and that blew me away! i used to come in all the time by myself or with freinds and just look out from the ob deck for hours.
im pretty good artistically so i also drew many thousands of diagrams comparing skyscrapers way back in the 1970's lol, when i was at school.
For my yr10 Art assignment i made a 3ft tall MLC centre out of plaster of paris! it looked awesome. I drew in each floor with flurescent paint and at night it would light up just like the real thing! it used to spin everyone out! i got 10/10 and a highly commended merit at an art show! i was hooked!
anyway, tall structures i feel are a part of me.like its programmed into me? weird.
In my early 20's i was successful getting a dream job making models of skyscrapers and going up over 100 rootops to accumulate all the data to make the details necessary to create these models. i had to pinch myself i wasnt dreaming. still do!
After many years of compiling data and creating many lists i assisted the editors on ss.com and also some illustrators on ssp to get the Sydney data more accurate.
Ive also been writing a book on history of tall structures in Australia and hopefully one day ill get to publish it. It will be the ultimate reference book for everything tall in Australia , from skyscrapers to lighthouse, chimneys to churches.ect also comparisn diagrams for each city and tallest structures thru time .I love the history of Australia's highrise ect.
Ive compiled hundreds of lists that i painstakingly compiled over the years either sending hours in Mitchell library or employing surveyors to accuratley measure a chimney or church in outback NSW or Collins St Melbourne!! Ie spent over $15000 of my own money and research alone.It will be all worth it in the end, a ref book thatyou can look up a height of anything or age of a structure. never attempted before.passionate? obsessed? yes of course.
I think its the ultimate interest!
anyway im off to bed.lol

in december last year i was part of a volleyball team that went to melbourne for a national schools volleyball tournament. we stayed in a backpackers hostel in north melbourne and at night we'd all go sit on the roof and talk.

we were very close to the CBD and towering above us were two huge scrapers that caught my attention and i was blown away by how big and cool they were. on returning to brisvegas i persued my interest and here i am.

i know now, off the top of my head, the name and heights of those 2 scrapers.

melbourne central:
roof: 211m, spires: 246m

bourke place:
roof: 224m, spire: 254m

Cul, I'm buying that book when it comes out

Me too! Will it have photographs (colour, bw?) or just drawings?

I was drawn into skyscraper freakism as a wee little shit during Adelaide's late 80's construction boom. I used to watch the new State Bank building (now Santos House) under construction, from bonython park in the western parklands. I thought we were building the second tallest building in the world (besides the empire state building hehe). I also remember as a wee less little shit watching the Myer Centre under construction. They had windows in the walls on the rundle mall side, where i'd stand for hours watching them dig that massive hole. I used to sticky tape A4 sheets of paper together and draw the whole skyline from memory, although not in exact place, I wanted every single building to be shown :)I was going to say that in those early years I used to stand at the foot of buildings and count how many levels they had - but I continued to do this for ages, and only really stopped because now, thanks to SS.com, I know the exact height of everything :)

I relied on my old man as a source of info on buildings, before this mystical internet thing was in everyone's home. He was a contract painter, and did a lot of jobs on adelaide skyscrapers, such as Tax Tower. I felt jipped when he told me Perth had a 50 storey building, Brisbane 40 storeys, etc etc. ;) I used to always ask him what needs to happen for big buildings to get built. He explained it by saying if you have x million amount of people, they build them. I took this to mean that when Adelaide got 2 million people, we'd be given a 50 storey building :D

Growing up in Wagga Wagga, I used to think that it was a huge city, they had a Kmart, Grace Bros, Woolworths, Coles, a Zoo, a Huge Hospital, fancy hotels and Kentucky Fried Chicken - I still remember when they opened up a McDonalds next to the long-serving Pizza Hut! To me - the place was bustling, then as a teenager on one of our visits to Sydney (to See Paternal Grandparents in Greenacre), just staring up at those towers made me dizzy - Centrepoint was my favourite - I didn't go up there until I was 22! In 1987 me and my brothers visited Canberra for the first time, we went to the Royal Canberra Hospital, an old multistorey hospital on Acton Peninsula, we visited our first shopping mall, saw city walk and garema place (I had never walked down a pedestrian mall before that) and driven past New Parliament House while it was under construction - truly a spectacular sight!

Sydney stared my love affair with tall buildings and Canberra put the size of cities in perspective for me.