[iostream23]

Skyscrapers are disproportionately tall for their width. This leads to the mentioned lateral movement issues discussed. The great pyramid of Giza does not have such issues due to its literal pyramidic shape with its wide base. It would seem to me, purely based on common sense, that skyscrapers are unnecessarily tippy and flexy due to the bizarre interest in making a thin needle-like building with a small base section.

Why would we not consider simply making tall buildings proportionally wide instead of this obviously flawed tippy needle thingy?

Problems with tippy needles include: foundations and their connections to bedrock, simple physical fulcrum principles, and the obvious inability to spread forces over a larger area. It’s a bit like trying to hold a large Christmas tree up with a small stand with low mass… doomed to problems

[analog31]

Nobody wants to live or work on the inside. People like windows and natural light. There's a premium on having a high surface-to-volume ratio.

[iostream23]

Good point, I wonder if light shafts ameliorate that sufficiently, or altered internal topologies, like cutouts

[rendall]

You should look at the works of Paolo Soleri, an architect who designed buildings to accommodate the living needs of up to hundreds of thousands of people. Despite their size, they have light and air throughout. Pretty remarkable.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Paolo+Soleri+arcology&iar=images&i...

[aiisjustanif]

No, I want windows that I can open.

[analog31]

Maybe an array of towers, buttressed together by walkways.

[gpm]

Enough walkways would also alleviate the elevator problem, by reducing the need for vertical travel.

[mattlondon]

They tried that in the UK in the post-war era of building residential low-rises.

Universally hated. People didn't want to only go where the walkways let them go. Turns out we're lazy (https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/oct/02/walkways-in-t...).

They are making a slight comeback but as more of a leisure thing I think - somewhere nice/novel to go for a stroll on a sunny day, rather than when doing your morning power-walk from the tube/bus station to your office etc (e.g. New York high line type thing)

[ceras]

There are downsides to wide buildings and how the impact the street's ability to feel human-scale: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/06/is-building-height-d...

There was a study awhile back that showed people were a bit more agitated / negative-feeling when walking past a very wide building vs narrow buildings in NYC. (I happened to live near and frequently pass that wide building, and like the study participants didn't like it.)

There are also downsides to deep buildings for residential use: they make reasonable apartment layouts hard because the windows are too far apart. Old deep warehouse buildings often get converted to over-sized loft apartment when converted. While living in a loft is sometimes romanticized for luxury living, the lack of windows and (thus) interior walls makes them a poor fit for families, and the large size makes them expensive for singles and couples.