Frank Lloyd Wright's mile high skyscraper proposal (2021)

The problem is when the park exists just as negative space between the buildings, as a way to provide seperation.

Towers surrounding a park, like Central Park in New York (or any decent size park in Manhattan) works well. Towers as a city wall like Grant Park in Chicago also work well. In both cases the park is a focal point of the urban form which puts all attention on the communal area it represents.

The purpose of "towers in a park" was to break up the urban form, and have density without urbanism. One big problem they were trying to avoid is rooms where the "view" out the window was of a ventilation shaft between buildings. They wanted towers with "no such thing as a bad view" by positioning them in a staggered layout and with substantial setbacks. This creates a bunch of awkward negative spaces in the layout and the architect just stamps "park" on all the vacant areas.

The result might be good views from inside the buildings but the no-man's-land between them becomes an alienating place with broken sight lines and blind corners. Toss in a criminal element and you end up with some really unpleasant spaces.

A city is about what you can do. The skyscrapper in a park is less useful because you cannot walk to stores, work, or other things. As such people living there become used to driving everywhere. Even if they want to go to a park they will - out of habit - get in the car, and drive - at this point the local park is no better than any other. All those cars in fact imply a large parking lot and so the park isn't in walking distance of the door so it is reasonable to drive across the parking lot if you do want to visit that park.

In short the park is too large compared to everything else and so it isn't enough of a draw for locals to keep out the rif-raf.

Note that I said drive, not take transit above. Although the density might be there, the sky scrapper in the park ends up acting like a cul-de-sac: all transit has to make long detours to get to each one and so the effective speed of transit is unacceptably slow for any trip thus forcing people to drive just to get a reasonable trip time.

Look up the history of Le Corbusiers’s housing developments. Huge gap between theoretically awesome and how they were used in practice.

People pass between small buildings and generally do things outside for practical reasons.

A giant tower in a park just encapsulates everyone and leaves the park empty.

Easily observable and any why the campus model took root.

Regular parks are generally a lot smaller, so it’s easier to keep them busy and above the desolate threshold.

The thing about the tower in the park ethos was that every building should be surrounded by park and the neighborhood should be more park than city. That’s way too low of a density to keep parks safe.

In Chicago they close the parks at night. You can't close a park if people need to get to and from a building in the middle of it.

It takes preparation, resources, a vehicle, travel to the trailhead, motivation, effort, and miles of walking to get into trails in a national forest. Potential victims on a trail aren’t carrying many valuables because they’re out hiking.

A city park is within walking distance, requires no vehicle to get to, can be visited on a whim, and potential victims are more likely carrying valuables (jewelry, electronics, nice handbags). Criminals can visit the park, commit a crime, and disappear back into the dense city on a whim, without planning or preparing.

Most crimes in this context are crimes of convenience. Hiking long trails is not convenient.

Some guesses:

1. A low traffic urban park still has some traffic, and criminals want reasonable waiting times. You might wait all day on a hiking trail.

2. Escape routes. Harder to make a clean getaway on a trail. Often one way out, a single trail head, and then a drive. That's another thing, you probably need a car. In an urban park you can vanish back into the city from multiple exit points.

3. Crimes of opportunity. Most muggings aren't planned out far in advance. Driving to a hiking spot and patiently waiting isn't the psychological place typical criminals are operating from. Serial killers, maybe... and sometimes those killings do happen in secluded hiking areas.

it's not the parent commenter's theory, it's a well established architectural and urban planning theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_in_the_park

but i'd assume that the main difference is that the hundreds of miles of trails and national forest behind your house doesn't have a residential tower stuck in the middle of it.

Typically the built environment is going to be a better place to find action for ne’er do wells looking for action. Not being seen doesn’t matter much without opportunity.

To put it another way, hundreds of miles of forest trails sounds like a lot of work.

I'm assuming you live in a less populated area, which would also (on average) mean fewer criminals. Lower usage in high density vs lower usage in low density.

Parkland that is not often used to capacity that has less people near it would naturally also have less crime from people within it, because there’s not many people to commit crimes nearby in the first place. E.G. Los Angeles National Forest

Parkland that is not often used to capacity that has a lot of people near it would likely have more crime, because you’ve essentially created a glorified alleyway. E.G. Central Park in the 70s, when you didn’t want to be nearby it near sundown.

Central Park is a good case study of this phenomenon, because it’s now one of the most heavily used parks in one of most densely populated areas in the world, and billionaires pay premiums to live next to it. That didn’t always used to be the case, and it was considered dangerous.

I am not the person you asked, but it seems to me the key difference is concentration of accessible resources. If so, the areas where the trails behind your house intersect with wealthy suburban or urban areas are the areas most likely to conceal would-be robbers.

"towers in the park" is a pretty specific type of topology, where the only access to the tower is through the park without any type of through or cross traffic.

The Vancouver I saw (BC) didn't have any. I'm not saying they don't exist, but what I saw was towers surrounded by one and two story buildings. There were parks and a lot of dead area, but nothing that was tower surrounded by parks.

Can you point to a specific tower you're thinking of?

I would hardly argue that the Shinagawa corporate park, if you mean where the Intercontinental is and where Nikon used to be, works well. There's basically no human activity at ground level except people walking to and from the train.

they at least often call the cops. but actively present people are generally a deterrent to crime, particularly crowds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_in_the_park#Criticism_a...

who said they were fake? I just said the reality often didn't pan out that well.

It seems to me like elevator shafts with a single elevator going up and down is somewhat of a waste of building volume, with limited throughput similar to that of single-track railway.

Couldn't a smaller number of shafts move a greater amount of people using one-way traffic, paternoster-style?

> The limiting factor for tall buildings is elevators: The taller the building, the greater a percentage of the floor space gets taken up by elevator shaft

That’s only true if you plan for getting about everybody into and out of the building every day, at ground level.

There are some ‘designs’ (rather: rough ideas, typically in science fiction, and often dystopian) that let go of that constraint (think flying cars landing on balconies or enormous buildings where people mostly live and work on a few floors of an enormous building)

If you just need one drawing of something unique it is probably still fastest. But nobody needs one drawing of something unique. You often want to take your drawing and program some CNC (3d printer...) to build parts and CAD/CAM can do that much quicker. You often want more than one copy of the drawing reduced/enlarged. You often want to give different views to different people which CAD will just do with a few clicks. You often want to run analysis for various things (do the beams work, will the pipes carry the needed water...). Many more things modern CAD can just do and more things are being added - you just need to learn to use a computer.

He also illegally logged land on someone else's property to give himself a river view at Taliesen the First.

And removed a load bearing wall from his sister's house and didn't replace it.

He's not my favorite architect by a long way. And I find the idea of him being in charge of a mile tall building to be horrifying.

> suburbia is supposedly better for kids even though they have nothing to do and rely on their parents to be driven to every activity.

That's a USofAian "suburb" .. not a well designed suburb.

There are many types of "dense", ranging from all skyscrapers, through (say) dense row housing with much open space, to big single house blocks everywhere (arguably the worst form).

Elsewhere in the world suburbs are surrounded by green belts and have embedded parks, footpaths and cycleways, shops, etc that are reachable without cars.

Alexander doesn't like sky scrapers, but he absolutely does not advocate for suburbia, at least not the the car-dependent hellscape you presumably have in mind.

You can archive considerable density without skyscrapers. In fact we've been building vibrant, walkable cities without skyscrapers for most of history.

Ah, you didn't catch the last line:

> And finally, don't take the four-story limit too literally. Occasional exceptions from the general rule are very important - High Places (62)

https://www.iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl062.htm

Calling Christopher Alexander an idiot in the context of architecture or urbanism is like calling Linus Torvalds a casual programmer. Peak Dunning-Kruger.