Ive always thought the word "Shadowun" had two meanings: first the most obvious one, where the "shadow" part means illegal activities conducted by the PCs; and then there is (or so I thought) this meaning for "shadow" that indicates an almost always darkened ambience of the Seattle downtown area, because of its super-tall buildings.

So, what are the talles buildings in Downtown area, and what are its heights ? (im almost sure Renraku arcology is the taller one, but I dont know its height, nor how much stories it has)

Thanks.

Well, there is the space needle. I think that is the tallest thing in the city right now. Other than that, it isn't all that tall compared to somewhere like new york. Of course that is modern day (or, at least my vague memory from when I visited around 18 years ago), may have changed in SR. It still has its tall buildings and such, just more like 10-20 story buildings than 30-50+ story buildings.

Are you sure? I think ive read somewhere the Renraku arcology have almost 300 stories. If we consider each story´s height at 4 meters, this would mean the Renraku arcology is more than 1000 meters tall.


By the way, the highest building nowadays is more aprox 850 meters high, and is located in Dubay: http://architecture.about.com/od/skyscrape...Burj-Dubai-.htm

I agree that buildings should be getting taller. Advances in materials technology make the buildings cheaper, while property values in Downtown has probably gone up up up!. This means the skyscraper makes more sense in more situations.

The Space Needle is not the Tallest building, not even top 5. And it was never the tallest building either. I add the top 25 below, cheers




Quick edit: The tallest of NY (third in US) is 443 meters.

And let me just add that the view from 1201 Third Avenue is beautiful.

The Renraku Arcology—according to Shutdown—has a base 780 × 650 meters, and a height of 969 meters. Its design is a truncated pyramid, and based on the preponderance of the illustrations of the building, I would estimate that the roof dimensions are about half the base (and thus the roof area is ¹/₄ the base).

All of that gives us a building with a volume of ~286.6 million m³. To compare, the Sears Tower has a volume of ~1.5 million m³. This means that the Renraku Arcology has a volume equal to ~190 Sears Towers.

Even with advanced materials is it even conceivable to build a building that big? The largest building in the world in terms of volume is 13.3 m3 which would be a fraction of the arcology.

The limiting factor today is probably resources—we're talking about a huge amount of footprint in prime downtown land, to start with, and then after that a project of truly gargantuan scope. I won't speculate on how the Arc gets made earthquake-resistant, but simply in terms of making it stand up I think its massive girth makes that much less difficult than a narrower but equally-tall building (consider that based on MJBurrage's volume estimate we're talking an average ~565 meters of height per square meter of base—and there are certainly comparably-sized non-tapered buildings).

Other tall buildings of note in canon are the Federal Building (72 stories), the Aztechnology Pyramid (base 500 meters square; pyramid proper 195 meters square and 300 tall, for 72 floors), and… well, that's all I can find. There are a few other possible candidates for large buildings, for example the Mitsuhama compound (at least 50 stories on one of the buildings if you consider "counting windows in the artwork" a reliable technique). It looks like if we assume that most large buildings are described in canon, the skyline is mostly only a little taller than, say, Boston (with the notable exception of the Arc). Then again, that may be a bad assumption.

It again involves relying on art, but I thought there were some books with art that showed the skyline of the Downtown area. Can't find any good examples at the moment, though.

~J

Do not forget the Fuchi/Novatech building. From the art in old sourcebooks, it looks pretty high too.

SWWiki lists the Arc as the *ninth* largest building in the world - not sure of the source, but eight buildings with greater than 280 million cubic meters of volume? The largest building in the world by volume today is about a twentieth of that (appropriately enough, a Boeing plant in Washington). Any word on what the others are? Seaside Arkoblocks? Ares spacecraft plants? Vast underground compounds?

Absent a more specific comment in a Shadowrun book, I would assume they are talking height, not volume.

So there are eight buildings taller than 969 meters. In real life, Kuwait City is already prepping the site for—Burj Mubarak al Kabir—a 1,001 meter building.

SR4A BBB. Google-fu found this one.

I know that can't be the one I'm thinking of, on account of it being in an SR4 book.

Hm. That one's a good illustration of the peril of relying on art, I guess—it's hard to tell the angles, but it looks to me like a number of those further-off buildings are taller than the Arc, which I doubt.

~J

I would agree that the further away buildings do in fact look taller.

In honesty, building materials aren't that big of a problem for a building like the archeology, largely because it is based on a pyramid design. This means that the load that any given level has to bear is distributed over a greater area than on something like a sky-scraper. The main reason you don't see these today is purely cost like Kage said. You have the cost of the land itself (and downtown, you're talking a fortune for something like an archeology), the cost of the raw materials, and the cost of the labor to put it all together. Not to mention any such project would be exceedingly long term, and most people don't like to look at long term too much.

Then there is utility. Sure, you could spend trillions of dollars to make this, but what kind of benefit would it provide? With the world currently as it is, it wouldn't provide a business much benefit of any kind. There would certainly be some benefits, but not nearly enough to justify the cost and time.

What you're more likely to see are things like the X-SEED 4000, funded by governments that are taxed (limited, not taxes) for land. Japan in particular is well known for having overcrowding issues, and hence the X-SEED.

For those not following the link, the '4000' in X-SEED 4000 is how many meters tall it is. The plan was never actually designed to be built, but we can dream, right?

Only until corps figure out a way to charge us for that too

The older art for the Arcology was closer in appearance to the Tyrell building from Blade Runner.

The SR4A art shows a structure with simpler lines, and a smaller roof. Assuming from the newer art that the roof dimensions ~¹/₄ the base—making the roof area ~¹/₁₆th—the Arcology's volume becomes ~215 million m³

Interesting result, averaging my first estimate with the new one gives a nice round ~250 million m³ as a result that could be claimed to fit close enough to all images of the building.