Professor
So, generally we think of high-rise buildings as being... you know. . . a modern urban feature, and definitely it's true that until the 19th century, buildings of over six stories were quite rare. Would anyone care to speculate as to why that might be?
Male Student
Is it because until then people just . . . uh. .. didn't have the technology to build higher buildings?
Professor
You might think so, but in fact technology existed in ancient times to produce often extremely high structures. Take the Great Pyramid of Giza in ancient Egypt. It was built in like the 26 th century BC. But that thing is 480 feet tall! No, it wasn't technology that was holding the ancients back from building skyscrapers. Any other suggestions?
Female Student
Well, professor, they didn't have elevators back then, right? So that means the higher the building, the more steps you you'd have to climb up.
Professor
Yes, Cathy. Nice one. That's definitely one of the big.. .um... major reasons. Having lots of stairs to climb was impractical for inhabitants. Another reason has to do with engineering. The pumps of the day couldn't deliver water pressure high enough to supply running water much over 100 feet. So when you couple this with the lack of elevators... well, you can see how buildings that are above a certain height start to become ... um ... extremely inconvenient.
That doesn't mean that high-rise apartments are strictly a modern invention, by any means. Ancient Roman residential buildings called . uh... "insulae" for example, frequently reached up to ten or more stories. That would make them over 100 feet tall. The Roman historian Martial alludes to a poor man, um.. .his neighbor, who was obliged to climb 200 steps to reach his room. How many times a day would you want to make that trip? Especially carrying a few gallons of water for your cooking and bath! The lower floors were typically occupied by either shops or wealthy families, while the upper stories were rented out to the lower classes... the peasants. Surviving records indicate that even in provincial towns like . . .uh. . . Hermopolis in Roman Egypt, they had buildings up to like seven-stories, and that was in the 3rd century AD! One major problem with these old skyscrapers, however, was the lack of building codes and standards. Unscrupulous builders could make huge sums of money by throwing up apartments with no worries about safety. In fact, so great was the number of these houses in ancients Rome, and so badly were they constructed, that in A. D. 60 the Emperor Otho, found his road blocked for twenty miles by the ruins of collapsed tenements. It seems their foundations had been eroded by heavy rains. Apparently this sort of thing was really common. One writer of the times describes tenants as constantly fearing to be either burned or buried alive.
Several emperors, beginning with Augustus in 10 BC, attempted to set building codes with limits of 20—25 meters for multi-story buildings, but it doesn't seem to have had much effect. A report from Florence in the 12th century states.. |
