With super tall towers under construction right now that top out at over 150 floors, what is the likelihood of such towers going up in the Seattle Sprawl during the 2040s-2070s?

The new Seattle 2072 sourcebook notes the sizes of several buildings, such as the Arcolohy or the Pyramid in Downtown, but little reference is made to the overall density or general height of 'Plex's core.

While I realize that it is 'as tall as I want it to be [for my game] [blah blah blah]', I am wondering what the DS crew thinks about this.

I tend towards thinking that the majority of core Downtown has a minimal height average of 20 stories with certain blocks having groupings of some really, really big buildings. I wouldn't be surprised by a Hab-Plex of five or six towers, each some 90 stories tall with major corporations leasing 20 or 30 contiguous floors. The sourcebook, however, makes regular notes about '5' or '10' stories of shopping or noting restaurants and clubs and businesses without any inferences to what buildings they reside in, if they are free standing etc.

How tall is The Plex. How tall is Your Plex?

The Arc is by far the tallest building, dominating the skyline. The other notable structure is the Aztech pyramid, though more becaue if lighting and width. All other skyscrapers are more or less average - nothing that'd stand out in Manhattan today. Think Twin Towers or smaller. The first SR core book had the city core laid out. Try and get it.

The super tall towers are elsewhere. There is a mile-high tower in Atlanta, for instance (source is the ancient Neo-Anarchist's Guide to North America though), the Cord Mutual tower, HQ of the Cord Mutual Bank and Insurance group. We haven't heared anything from the CAS ' AAs ever since.

AFAIK the Space Needle (184m/605ft) is still a Seattle landmark, so I'd expect most buildings to be not as high. Although I think the location of the Space Needle is a bit north of "core downtown", so I'd guess that average building height quickly declines once you leave the business district.

I also don't see much demand for the extreme supertowers in Seattle, considering the metroplex' demographics. IMHO that's where the desired cyberpunk atmosphere and the numbers presented in the books clash a bit. There's also the issue of economics: The higher the building, the more space is needed for utilities, especially elevators. IIRC today around fifty floors is generally considered the maximum height which makes economic sense.

Of course you'll have some very high buildings like AA-AAA headquarters, but I'd consider those to be an (highly visible) minority.

I always assume the Seattle Metroplex to have three times the official number of residents.

The space needle is a landmark but in artwork some of the chrome towers are bigger. I think if you take the number of floors in the archology and then allow 8-10 feet per floor you should be able to work out its height.

They have not, to the best of my knowledge, ever provided a hard answer on this, so I tend to go for the super-densely built up "oh hell, no more room for expansion across the surface so I guess we need to build UP!" feel of classic cyberpunk art and cinema.

I go for a more New York feel at most. Seattle 2072 is not Blade Runner.

My take on population in the metroplex is generally twice to three times as dense.

As always, a little bit of vaguery leaves the whole thing open for interpretation.

My metroplex has several large complexes in the interior downtown. In a recent run, there was a pair of buildings - Hastings and Wabash buildings - that were each over 80 floors and were linked by a skybridge. Renraku leased twenty floors in the Hastings building and one of their workers, a target for an extraction, would commute across the skybridge to a rooftop restaurant on the Wabash building. The extraction could take place in either building, on the sky bridge or the rooftop restaurant (or to and from work / at home). One of the fun twists was that every 5 to 10 floors, corporate jurisdiction would change and the security contractors with it.

As it stands, having a AAA owning something _besides_ an Arcology or a Pyramid is a little strange. Also, Seattle 2072 states that the Pyramid is not really the largest AAA complex in Seattle anyways (FedBoeing?). All the same, I think of the AAAs owning tons of subsidiaries throughout the plex, and these subsidiaries often take up contiguous floors in office towers ranging from 50 to 80 floors in height.

I also suggest in my version of the Plex that there is a nearly continuous downtown into parts of Tacoma, Auburn and Everett, with major security check points leading to Bellevue. Outer districts have several tall complexes - Bellevue has a complex of at least six towers over 60 stories that provide vertically integrated high security, high density housing...

Keep telling me stories about your Metroplexes. Helps me know mine better.

From a quick perusal, the ACHE is stated as being nearly a kilometer high, the Azzie pyramid is 300 meters and 72 stories, the fed-boeing offices are said to be 70 stories, and the Seattle Federal Building is 72 stories.

Based on what I see in Seattle in 2010, then punctuated by about 20 years of chaos it's doubtful that the tall multi-story Seattle Downtown core has spread much beyond where it is today, Southern end about Yesler Street and Northern end about Lanora, with section of Condos in the high 40's stretching from Lenora to Denny Way. The Western Border hits the Waterfront and the Eatsern side is hemmed in by I-5. What has much more likely happened is that the vast expanses of 1-2 story professional buildings and 2-3 story apartments have grown up a couple stories in the surrounding areas to accomodate the additionall SINed population. The poor Geologic composition of Downtown makes really tall towers a very expensive proposition, the soil is primarily sand sitting on top of a thick layer of water impermeable clay, very deep digs or pilings are required. This is also why in Real Life there is no subway system in Seattle. New York is very different, the bedrock is very close to the surface which is much more conducive to building tall towers and to tunneling. Having travelled around a bit one thing about Seattle which is different is the amount of Trees in the city itself, I punctuate my shadowrun games with a lot of trees (usually not in good shape thanks to 5+ decades of incresingly more acidic rain), even in Downtown there are imported manicured trees linging a lot of the streets. The other thing none of the source books do is give a good impression about the frequent elevation changes. Seattle has a lot of hills, some very steep and tall. The Space Needle is about 600' tall, and sits on 5th Avenue North & Denny Way (roughly) about 15 block north Kerry Park looks over the Seattle Center to a point about two thirds up the Space Needle.

Along the lines of Sky Scrapers in Seattle and some coprs that probably are still in the Business of Building Skyscrapers (And now maybe leasing and managing them) are Selig Construction and Sellen Construction.

Renraku Arcology had 320 floors. The 1st ed Seattle Sourcebook gave the number of floors of several buildings. For most buildings in Downtown, the numbers were between 10 and 30 stories. The Federal Building had 72, as Aztechnology pyramid, Federated-Boeing tower 70, and Westin Hostel 60. Tacoma Charity General hospital has 25 floors, and Bellevue Hilton has 20. However, no number is given for Ares, Shiawase, Fuchi or MCT towers.

There's also a building with 350+ floors on it in Chicago. It's on or around page 88 of Bug City.

I'd imagine that towers breaking 150+ floors would be somewhat common in 2070ish.

How? Don't towers topping 150 floors have weight and wind issues?

You assume it's a tower. Pyramids, for example, can still have floor levels. Arcologies can be sprawling complexes - some consider the Las Vegas Strip to be arcologies due to the transportation networks between several of the hotel/casinos.

There are also advanced next-generation building materials and construction techniques to take into account. With the state of construction in 2072, they're actually on the verge of being able to build space elevators in canon, and IIRC, Saeder-Krupp's "Lost/Stock Options" tower was nano-built as a uniframe structure with material properties and stress tolerances right out of Frank Lloyd Wright's wet dreams.

Remember, kids: It's not handwaving. It's FutureScience™!

The issue with Seattle is that Downtown (the actual area in 2010, not the district in 2072) is built in the lowlands (former tide flats for a large amount of it) at the bottoms of several hills and hemmed in by lakes and the Puget Sound. The reason you won't have a ton of super tall buildings is because you'd be building them either into the side of or on top of tall hills. Looking at the geology and weather of the area, it'd be impractical to build such buildings in those locations. That being said, there are currently many 20+ story buildings in downtown Seattle. As a result, what you have is a good number of tall buildings grouped into a confined space due to geological constrictions on practical locations.

Yes, but at what cost? Rarely are things of that nature done just because they can. There is a cost of construction factor to take into account. Not saying nobody will do it, just saying it limits the likely number.

It was a corporate HQ - pretty much all of Renraku's non-Japan work was done there. It had access to the UCAS, NAN and Tir markets, so building a full arcology made economic sense. It was also a big PR and marketing move - plus it did wonders for recruiting before Deus. It was able to centralize most of its non-production operations there since it could hold so many people. It wasn't wise to put all their eggs in one basket, but economically it made sense for them at the time.

Indeed, though it also bears mentioning limited-scale nanoconstruction techniques are (IIRC) fairly common-use and actually reduce the amount of time and money it takes to put up a new structure.

Really, I only brought it up to highlight it as one more little factor for GMs to take into account when conceiving (or trying to justify...) their own personal Seattle skyline.

The 350+ story building in Chicago is "The Spire" and it is still in cannon as of SR4. Of course, Chicago lost the Sears Tower (despite what some SR art says) during the night of rage, so I guess they need SOME downtown landmarks.

Also, super tall buildings (higher then 150 stories) are possible even today, they just aren't undertaken lightly. A spire project actually WAS proposed for Chicago (presumably around the time Bug City was first written) and was only recently scrapped as infeasible due to the current global economy. I may be wrong, but I believe the Spire designs in SR4 are closely modeled after concept sketches for the actual thing.

All I'm trying to say is that, if there is a dense number of people, especially wealthy corporations trying to show off, I should think there would be at least one big, entirely corporate building, in any city. Just so that a company can say "see that building? Its ours. By way of inference, this city is also ours."

If any one get's the chance check out Caprica. It's as if they read shadowrun and said "Hey this would make a good series". The CGI flyovers of Caprica are fantastic and seem to be a good representation of downtown. The V world (there version of the matrix) new cap city looks a good representation of the areas going from "We have lot's of money" too "You have no money".

I always thought of the arcology as the Tyrell Corp building. Just my take