more skyscrapers in europe

Is it possible to achieve a europe in which skyscrapers like you see in the USA, or variouis asian countries are more common, especially in urban centres ? however tere should still be historical core cities, only the newer city parts would been modern with skyscrapers and lot of neon lights.
 
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It's quite difficult to get both.

London is heading in that direction with the developments in Canary Wharf, the City and so forth that mean there are some pretty dense pockets of skyscrapers just next to the historic bits.

Most of the cities with lots of skyscrapers lost their historic parts in the war though (Frankfurt etc.)
 
I suppose that it depends on the nations, I know Ireland has fairly tight restrictions on planning and up to the 90's there wasn't the economic support for building like that, since then we were moving that way before the crash with several "highrises", (OK they are less than 20 stories) but with the crash that construction is gone now and won't be seen again.
 
Paris for one physically cannot support Sky scrapers due to the catocombs beneath it, I guess the same holds true for a lot of Europe.
 
I suppose that it depends on the nations, I know Ireland has fairly tight restrictions on planning and up to the 90's there wasn't the economic support for building like that, since then we were moving that way before the crash with several "highrises", (OK they are less than 20 stories) but with the crash that construction is gone now and won't be seen again.

I thought a few of them would have gone up during Celtic Tiger.
 
Then explain La Defense.

It's outside the area of the stone mines (of which the catacombs are a small part), on the other side of the Seine actually.

The same applies for the Eiffel Tower and Tour Montparnasse, but as an example the Paris Observatory spent most of the construction budget on strengthening the foundations due to the mines.

Although the fact that the Tour Montparnasse is widely considered both at the time of construction and now to be the ugliest in Paris (and according to one poll second ulgiest world wide) didn't exactly help matters when it came to the skyscraper ban.
 
I thought a few of them would have gone up during Celtic Tiger.

It's not the Irish character for highrises, the highest is in Cork at 17 stories and b the others are a) 1970s-80s and b) non-residential and smaller than 17 stories. At the end of the Tiger there were plans for some 25ish story buildings in Dublin but they got shot down over planning laws.

Not to be a smart arse but the planning laws would give far more to a 200+ old building than a new development. A fairly large development of a shopping center and apartments in Cork city center had to build in a listed building just to get planning.
 
It's not the Irish character for highrises, the highest is in Cork at 17 stories and b the others are a) 1970s-80s and b) non-residential and smaller than 17 stories. At the end of the Tiger there were plans for some 25ish story buildings in Dublin but they got shot down over planning laws.

Not to be a smart arse but the planning laws would give far more to a 200+ old building than a new development. A fairly large development of a shopping center and apartments in Cork city center had to build in a listed building just to get planning.

What about the U2 Tower? I also heard that there were some fairly high-rise projects approved in the Dublin Docklands.

Also, not to be annoying, but why did you just use the American spelling for "center" if you're Irish? Are you secretly a Plastic Paddy?:eek::p
 
What about the U2 Tower? I also heard that there were some fairly high-rise projects approved in the Dublin Docklands.

Also, not to be annoying, but why did you just use the American spelling for "center" if you're Irish? Are you secretly a Plastic Paddy?:eek::p

Most of the Dockland developments were at the proposal stage, but really I can't see them every happening and even without the crash would have struggled to get Irish tenants, we like to own houses and land, it's a legacy character flaw, we have one of the highest home-ownership rates in the EU(which lead to the situation we are now in). If you go to the wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_in_Ireland#Tallest_buildings you can see what I mean about the sizes in the Ireland. Though I had no idea about all the tall churches, certainly didn't know the local in Cobh ranked on the list.

As to the spelling, I just got sick of it always coming up in red when I typed it in. Trust me while I've spent time in the States, I'm still on the banks of the Lee and a full blooded support of the People's Republic.:D
 
So you work for the Chinese!:eek:

People's Republic of Cork (it's an Irish joke:D), though I do remember a conversation with an American tourist couple that seemed to think it was Cork that was causing the Troubles trying to succeed. That was an interesting conversation.
 
Destroy more of Europe in WW2 or WW3.
The rebuilding will tend towards taller (uglier) buildings rather than having to be careful to maintain the character of old cities.
See Japan for an example, virtually untouched by the war Kyoto doesn't have many tall buildings despite that being Japan's usual tendency.
 
For a city to develop skyscraper developments the land value in the CBD (Central Business District) needs to be high enough to make the value of building up, offset the cost of commuting in/out.

In much of Europe, Urban Sprawl began in the 19thC when land value was 'low' centred around many smaller communities and so commercial and residential districts were built before the age of the sky scraper. These 'low value areas' have since developed into the 'medium value areas' that surround most European city centres. What were once outlying villages like Ealing, Greenwich or Enfield (In London for example IIRC) have thus become incorporated into the larger 'city area'.

In the US this never happened for the most part, their never were the pre-existing smaller communities which developers could 'latch onto'. Hence all development was centred around singular communities, like New York and so land value rose significantly compared to in Europe.


The end result being that in locations where you have isolated/restricted land, late industrialising city areas we see skyscrapers forming, but elsewhere we don't.



To get Europe to 'build more skyscrapers' well, you'd need to drastically change the last 1000 years of history to completely alter the demographics of social development across all/much of the Eurasia. This is more a pre=1900 discussion than post-1900 I'm afraid.
 
Nationalistic / Communism Skyscrapers

The Soviet Union had a number of "grand-design" projects for numerous cities before, during and after the war. These include the 'Seven Sisters' - the Hotel Ukraina, the Hotel Leningradskaya, the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Apartments, the Foreign Ministry and the Red Gates Building. Two were never constructed - the Zaryadye Administrative Building and the rather impressive Palace of the Soviets. Had the latter been constructed, I can see that its grandeur and pomp could (perhaps after the fall of the Iron Curtain) be replicated across Europe or, indeed, the Middle East. I think that any of the proposed designs (from Boris Iofan, Hector Hamilton and Ivan Zholtovsky) could have had this effect.

The USSR has become somewhat renowned for its interest in near-ridiculously large scale state-funded architecture. If these buildings were built (regardless on the effects on wartime resources), I could see the Soviet Union or Russia becoming a Holy Grail to skyscraper-lovers. The Peoples' Commissariat of Heavy Industry and the Peoples' Defence Commissariat were also proposed and impressive, along with greats such as the Palace of Technology and the Arch of Heroes. As I said, any of these could have inspired the creation of state-funded architecture elsewhere. I'm actually thinking China here (minus Sino-Soviet Split) although they have some pretty epic grandeur of their own.

Here's a link to the page to whet your appetite!
http://www.thethinkingblog.com/2007/08/gothic-stalinist-soviet-skyscrapers.html
 
Napoleon drastically re-shaped Paris. Hitler planned to do so to Berlin. A certain combination of ego and timing could allow it to happen, possibly even without the desolation of war to clear out space (though perhaps the kind of ego necessary makes the desolation inevitable?)

If you're just talking about retaining historical character, there are ways to do it in almost the same space as the highrises. They do it often here in DC: keep the structures facing the street the same, gut what's in the middle and back of a city block, and from the street you see 19th century rowhouses with taller buildings mounted in the center. Of course "city block" could prove a problem for many European cities, and if you want the actual structures preserved you're going to have to go lot-by-lot to see what can be built and where. And that is "just" a matter of zoning.

La Defense and Canary Warf are probably much more likely examples for spreading skyscrapers.

Have nations adopt tougher zoning laws mid-century, perhaps a continent-wide rural protectionist streak emerges. You'll certainly still see inner historic cores protected with a very dense ring of satellite cities and then an outer zone of protected farmland or possibly even nature preserves. I can see the propaganda posters now: A circle of Stone, a Ring of Steal, a Field of Green.
 
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