Building Spires. Should they be counted in a building's height?

[patrykus]

Originally Posted by Kanto

Wrong, you can't know physical height of a building from the official height because there might be an antenna above it. Then again, there might be not and that is what makes it confusing and dealing with imaginary numbers. With roof height and pinnacle height you're dealing with real numbers

You do know there is no building above. There maybe some equipment sticking out of it but not designed part of the structure. There is consistency and clarity. With your system you don't know if there is building above the point you called the official height. There is no clarity there. And antennas are always distinguishable, thin, and are never continuous part of the building, very often not even in the buildings design.

Oh, and you haven't answered me to this, and it is very essential here:

Originally Posted by patrykus

Say we have two identical (out and inside) mekka towers. One has offices in the crescent and one has them only below the clock. Would you really try to convince anybody that one is 200m shorter than the other?

And I don't thin you agree with HK999 since his idea is to measure even the antennas to the official height

[Kanto]

C'mon, you did read my last post, didn't you? I clearly said that I accept pinnacle height too and that roof height can't stand alone. there must be both of them. As to your building above, Neither a spire, nor an antenna are part of a building. They are structures on a building, so CTBUH official height is indeed only an imaginary number because from it you can't know whether a thin steel stick was counted or whether not

Btw, I also answered your Abby crescent question:

For me Abby with offices in its crescent is taller than Abby with offices only below its spire in roof height, but equally tall in pinnacle height.

[patrykus]

Originally Posted by Kanto

C'mon, you did read my last post, didn't you? I clearly said that I accept pinnacle height too and that roof height can't stand alone. there must be both of them. As to your building above, Neither a spire, nor an antenna are part of a building.

I bet close to nobody will agree with you that burj (or mecca tower) spire is not part of the building. It's nonsense. They don't just "sit" on top of the structure, they are heavily integrated. Now argue with that. Antennas are always attached somewhere and it's easy to say where. Even esb with its tapering top is easy subject to determine where spire ends and antenna starts.

Btw, I also answered your Abby crescent question:

The thing is we are not discussing additional types of measurement but a general one. If you say that one of such meka towers would have to be called taller than the other that's just example of pure nonsense.

[Kanto]

ESB has no spire, only an antenna. And it is only you who want to find a magical universally perfect height measurement method I already said that I want 2 methods to be recognized (roof and pinnacle) - roof as tallest building, pinnacle as tallest structure

Btw, just because we know a building as having its characteristic antenna or spire doesn't mean that they are part of the building

[patrykus]

Having two equally important measuring techniques is confusing. How should I answer to the question "how tall is this building?", or "which one of two is taller?". And ctbuh already have several measuring techniques. For esb:

Height: Architectural 381.0 meter / 1250 feet
Height: Occupied 373.1 meter / 1224 feet
Height: To Tip 443.2 meter / 1454 feet

Actually because they call it architectural it makes perfect sense to not count the antennas. If you wish you can use to tip or occupied. But you can't call roof height being always architectural because by definition it isn't. So what would you want to change here when we already have several measuring techniques available?

[Taller, Better]

I think it is nonsense to count most of the "spires" (aka thinly disguised antennae) in the height of a tower. This doesn't encourage taller towers, only taller "cheats".

[patrykus]

"most" is key word in your sentence

[Kanto]

Originally Posted by patrykus

Having two equally important measuring techniques is confusing. How should I answer to the question "how tall is this building?", or "which one of two is taller?". And ctbuh already have several measuring techniques. For esb:

Height: Architectural 381.0 meter / 1250 feet
Height: Occupied 373.1 meter / 1224 feet
Height: To Tip 443.2 meter / 1454 feet

Actually because they call it architectural it makes perfect sense to not count the antennas. If you wish you can use to tip or occupied. But you can't call roof height being always architectural because by definition it isn't. So what would you want to change here when we already have several measuring techniques available?

What I would like to see on CTBUH? Here it is:

Height: Major Architectural (roof height) - without antennas and spires
Height: To Tip (pinnacle height) - selfexplaining
Height: Occupied - selfexplaining

Spires are in my opinion a minor architectural feature, and therefore not worthy of being counted if their twins, antennas aren't counted either.

[patrykus]

Originally Posted by Kanto

Height: Major Architectural (roof height) - without antennas and spires

Lol that my friend ends the discussion. Good luck fighting "major architectural" figure in official ctbuh rankings. To bad it will be time wasted

[Kanto]

LOL, good luck to you fighting for the rights of cheating sticks

[patrykus]

cheers big ears

[iloveclassicrock7]

My system is a WIP, so don't judge so fast Patrykus. The spire of Abraj Al Bait counts, there are actual floors in it. The Burj counts too, because its spire was actually built like the rest of the building, it actually is more like an empty part of the building, rather then a spire. Like I said, the Jin Mao Tower and Taipei 101 are very much WIP. The eventual outcome I hope for is to have the right visual height. Everyone knows that the Petronas Towers don't look like a 450m building, and Everyone knows that 1 WTC looks like a 419 meter building.

Look at this -
Do they really want us to believe this 360 meter tower is 506 meters ? What is next, a 400m building with a 400m spire ? See, this system just doesn't work.

Remember this old freedom tower design that they tried to pass off as a 500m+ tower ?





Now look at this diagram I made


By CTBUH standards, the tallest building is the one in the middle, which has a roof height of around 1000m, but the one on the left has a roof height of 1900m, and the one on the
right has a roof height of 1950m. You may ask how they would ever call the building in the middle the tallest, well this shows how flawed their system is.

[Kanto]

OK, here goes my long promised opinion about fusing my and classicrock's system. I think that in general classic rock has got a better general system, but I think it would be good to add the exceptions I made for my system:

The basic rule is that a section on top of another section must be more than 50% of the largest dimension of the section it is on or otherwise it will be considered a apire/antenna. A section will be considered an antenna/spire if by megatalls and supertalls it has less than 9 meters or 30 feet.

Exceptions:

1, If there is an occupied floor in a section otherwise characterized as a spire/antenna, that section and all that is below it is part of the building / counted in roof height.

2, If a part of a section or another section has a top angle of more than 30° of a triangle between its top center and the two edges of the largest dimension of the section below it

So basicaly this system is the same as classicrock's but I have added my exceptions so that it better reflects to buildings with tappering roof. In this scenario the Burj Khalifa for example would go all the way to the top, because each section of it is only slightly thinner than the section below it, however, where the Burj Khalifa is less than 9 meters wide, there the spire begins and from there the building's sections won't count towards roof height. Here is my updated diagram:

[IMG]http://i46.************/2mqt3ld.png[/IMG]

[iloveclassicrock7]

I like it! One thing to mention though. When I said it must be wider then 30 feet, that was a thing I used to make sure that thin spires like the one on the Petronas didn't make it on the list. It may be 25 feet, or something around there, I haven't decided yet.

[Kanto]

I think 30 feet is a good number. Also, it is easy to remember for both meter users and feet users, pretty much like 300 meters/1000 feet for a supertall and 600 meters/2000 feet for a megatall

[dars-dm]

Do you think the spire of this building, for example, was built only to overpass some skyscrapers? (in Europe in 50s)

(wikipedia - Georg Dembowski)
We should understand that some spires look as a "natural continuation" of a building (the building will look incomplete if we remove the spire), and some don't. Because we can say that "natural looking" spires were initially planned during projwct works, but not placed during construction to overpass another building.

But, there's a problem. Chrysler building is considered the world's first supertall by many people and organisations, and the new criteria will ruin this 80-yr-old fact. This is as shocking for all the skyscraper enthusiasts as the "undiscovering" of Pluto as the 9th planet of 2006.

[Hudson11]

i believe that both spires and antennas should count towards the final height. A building is a structure, so an addition to that structure becomes a part of it. (and in most cases a permanent addition)
However IMO there's no sense in counting spires if antennas aren't counted. One actually serves a purpose, the other just sits on top, as decoration.

[singoone]

The difference is that spire are part of the building design a it won´t be removed anytime unlike antenna´s - you can add them or remove them later, they aren´t permanent parts of the building neither parts of the building design. Like patrykus said and it´s on the CTBUH - it´s architectural height - if you don´t get it, you can measure buildings by roof height or whatever.
No offence guys, it´s just my opinion.
P. S.: just look at the Burj - it´s clearly 828m, you can not lower that.

[Kanto]

It doesn't matter if they were planned to sit permanently on the building or not, a thin steel stick is still a thin steel stick. And it is very easy to remove or to elongate a spire just as it is to remove an antenna

[singoone]

Yes, you're right but spire is design element whether antenna is not. So it should not be counted. I agree it isn't fair but I still don't see better way to measure hight of the buildings since it's hard to recognise where the roof of plenty of buildings is.