Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/20/the-oldest-skyscrapers-in-the-world.html
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Eat your heart out, Millennium Tower!
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I read about Shibam a number of years ago, and I remain fascinated. The buildings are beautiful, the landscape spectacular, and it’s incredible that people could build a dense metropolitan area of high-rise buildings out of unfired mud bricks and then maintain it for centuries. The work required to keep it standing in the face of the elements must be enormous. It’s amazing what people can do within the limitations imposed by available local construction materials. It would be amazing to see in person, but it sounds like it’s really been taking a beating in the last decade, in between floods and bombings, so who knows how long it’ll last…
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Not really? Human beings have been building impressive buildings for centuries prior to the age of skyscrapers.
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I wonder how they compare to the Roman Insulae tenement blocks that reached between 20 and 30 metres tall?
A miracle that these buildings have survived - though goodness only knows how long they can remain given Yemen’s descent into the abyss.
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“Shibam on an Island” seems more appropriate
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The city is unique in its concentration of tall houses upon the elevated mound that rises out in the valley floor; the mound is surrounded by a fortified city wall at its base. The tallest house rises 29.15 m above its entrance on street level and 36.5 1 m above the wadi bed.
Shorter than the mudbrick minaret of Tarim (53 m), located just 50 kilometers to the east
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See also San Gimignano, although only a few towers actually remain.
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Not a skyscraper, but…
Shunet El-Zebib | World Monuments Fund
Shunet el-Zebib was built circa 2750 B.C.E. and served as a funerary cult enclosure of Khasekhemwy, a Second Dynasty king. The structure is one of Egypt’s oldest standing royal monuments and one of the oldest preserved mud brick buildings in the world. The two-part funerary complex, consisting of the underground tomb and the above-ground enclosure, is of great architectural importance, as it portrays the earliest stages of the evolution of the pyramid. The structure includes two concentric rectangular enclosure walls. Most of the inner wall is intact while only part of the outer wall remains. The enclosure walls stand 11-12 meters high in some places but suffers from structural instabilities as a result of a rising water table due to agricultural development, animal intervention, and wind and rain erosion. …
Coupla wikimedja images:
Well-preserved niches -
Lotsa great photographs here, but only mediocre info -
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I guess that one qualifies as a tower. We have built towers for much longer than skyscrapers.
Now to find out what differentiates one from the other…
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My favorite architecture critic
He talks about the definition of the skyscraper-- which sounds like it’s been rules-lawyered to death.
“the term skyscraper is reserved for a building that has a frame based structural system, so it’s not held up by the walls, and the facade needs to hang off that frame”
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It’s only a real skyscraper when it’s from the Loop area of Chicago; otherwise it’s just a sparkling high-rise.
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there’s an elaborate blog (or a book in blog form) that talks about that.
Meanwhile, the council on tall buildings and the urban habitat-- the very organization that defines skyscrapers in terms of metal frame construction also published this paper
which looks at the phenomenon of extraordinarily high buildings, independent of technology such as iron frames or elevators
The paper mentions the Insulae Felicitae of Rome (12 stories), Ghamdan Palace, Yemen (20 stories), Brussels City Hall, the Potela Palace (13 stories). and yes, Shibam (12 stories).
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