Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/01/23/oklahoma-citys-legends-tower-to-be-americas-tallest-building.html
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Skyscrapers are a stupid and wasteful use of resources in almost all circumstances. The only places where they make any sense at all are in areas like Manhattan or Singapore where there are hard limits on the available footprint for building space.
Building something like this in Oklahoma is just mind-bendingly dumb. There are 70something cities in North America alone that have higher urban density than OKC and none of them saw a need for this kind of goofy status symbol.
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Is there some ‘official’ designation to a building’s height measure? At whiles it seems that an extra twenty-three meters can be questionably gained with some-sort of antenna or zeppelin docking station.
(“heey… what’s the building with the most floors going down?” asks the mole king of Coruscant)
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They want to build that monstrosity in Bricktown? Ugh. I lived in OKC for about 9 years. Bricktown was built up shortly before I moved there in 1999. It’s the old warehouse district, and they converted into a shopping and entertainment district, with a canal and a minor league ballpark. It was a cool area, and the buildings were all mostly old, renovated brick warehouses, thus the name. Building the tallest skyscraper in the US in that part of OKC would just ruin the atmosphere. I hope they don’t gain approval.
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I don’t know – the picture looks like it’s south/southeast of the arena/convention center. Regardless, this is ridiculous. I was there in 2022 for a conference and the downtown was so empty, I don’t know why they’d need a tower like this.
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a place for billionaires to park their money?
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It’s adjacent to Bricktown. It’s currently a parking lot. The marquis on that rendering literally says The Boardwalk at Bricktown. And they clearly don’t need it. This is an ego thing.
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Tornados? I’d be more worried about all the micro-earthquakes from all that fracking….
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It’s for current residents to move into when the Chickasaw Nation takes back the remaining half of the state.
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This is quite baffling. Is this motivated by some kind of tax shelter type scheme that is only possible in the state? If its not that then it’s definitely the stupidest thing since the Millennium (leaning) Tower
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This is the only good reason to build a tower like this. In that case, I’m for it
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Look at those views at ground level. It’s almost completely defined by either parking or advertising.
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Look, I’ve been to OKC. I have been to the surrounding area of OKC. This would be like buying a Lamborghini to run a bus route near a trailer park. An embarrassment of riches surrounded by poverty and of dubious functional practicality.
I highly highly doubt this thing won’t get past the planning phase.
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On the plus side it will act like a distance marker on the plains. You will know how close you are to OKC when you see it on the horizon.
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With the sky high Office vacancies everywhere, why would anyone think this is a good idea?
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The artist’s rendering, showing this enormous tower looming over a landscape of low-rise buildings, really drives home how ridiculous this whole thing is. It’s obviously a stunt, and it sure seems like a stunt that doesn’t require anything to be built.
The comparison to Dubai seems apt, in that this requires some infrastructure (e.g. public transportation) that doesn’t exist there to be feasible. (Dubai just gives up on having anything be feasible and does it anyways, using lots of money to paper over the cracks until at some point the money will run out or they’ll get too big and the city will stop working.)
I was just looking up the size, and I thought, “oh, it only has 600k population - but maybe it’s fairly small?” Nope, it’s a huge, sprawling “city,” one of the largest, in square miles, in the US. The population density is a joke. I mean, I live in a city that’s a million people, with five times the population density and some of the most expensive real estate in the country, and a tower like this would still be absolutely absurd here.
I can’t believe it’s even intended to.
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In my experience when companies I’ve worked for were changing locations, the primary criteria were location, accessibility, and above all, cost of rent. OKC isn’t exactly Soho in either its London or NYC instances, but it seems to have the location bit down in terms of being in a city and seems to have a rep for low corporate office space rents. Since there isn’t a metro, just bus and streetcar service, it will need a lot of parking, which doesn’t look like an issue. It does look like it will be on the streetcar line for what that’s worth.
So, it comes down to rent, or in theory prestige, although anyone who’s willing to pay a penny more in rent for having an office in “the 6th tallest building in the world,” or even the tallest in the US is a fool who deserves to be taken for every dollar they have, as that number will inevitably go down once someone else decides to built yet another “tallest.” New construction like this may have long-term savings on cooling and heating, but it also means there are no savings on repurposing existing build outs, so the building owners are going to have to offer a generous build out allowance to attract new tenants, along with leasing rates comparable to other local office spaces.
My guess it that if it does get built, it’ll be mostly empty, like most skyscrapers, with nameplate offices and high-up residential suites being the best sellers, and everything other than those being bottom floor commercial storefront rentals, which are always your big moneymakers. But the likeliest outcome is that it fails to be built due to lack of up-front customers, which is also the usual fate of proposed skyscrapers.
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Unlikely it will even accomplish that since a skyscraper is significantly more energy-intensive and requires more maintenence than an equivalent amount of space spread across several shorter buildings. Just pumping water up to the highest floors or dispersing excess heat from air conditioning becomes a major challenge. Plus the higher the building goes the larger the portion of its total volume has to be dedicated to elevator shafts (which of course require extra maintenence as well).
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Ronald Hamburger has joined the conversation…
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