Tall Buildings

* See also Construction
* See also Rapture_City_Layout and Rapture_Cityscape
* See also Windows
* See also Art Deco - Great age of Skyscrapers
* See also Bioshock_Illogic
* See also City_Foundation
* See also TechnicalDrawings (Diagrams)
== REAL WORLD 'TALL' Is Done For MORE Than Just Because It Looks Good ==
You 'Go Vertical' ( Build Up ) when you have the highest land prices anywhere on Earth.
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Eight stories when seen close looks impressibly Tall.
In Raptures external views, we saw 60+ story tall buildings ( count the rows of windows ) off in the distance. Those might look 'good' to a game 'artist', but is needless in that it is Expensive, Wasteful and of Inconvenient excess. Much more practical shorter buildings only had to be placed closer to the Player to LOOM just as impressively in the game. A cityscape of 'tall' 8 story buildings can be awesome in its own way ( while the buildings we actually were inside of during the game were generally quite SQUAT, with limited multiple floors ).
The game artists had a limited and anecdotal idea of what real cityscapes are like. Their repeating the same scene over and over again made it even worse  ( Including many Skyboxes repeating the same texture picture window view out opposite sides of buildings ).
Awesome HUGE NYC-like skyline ... Consider such views are conflicted with how small Rapture was supposed to be ( likely 20 K - 40 K people verasus a city of Millions ), and ALSO how an undersea city would have to exist.
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Sky Scrapers - Racing to be the tallest. The Art Deco Chrysler Building was finished just before the Empire State Building surpassed it, and then the results of 1929 Crash ended that type of competition.
We (in the game) were always in short Squat buildings as we wandered about inside Rapture. You should have seen a view like THIS of one of the tall buildings next door/nearby (looking up and up), instead of mysteriously being at a level halfway up some distant too tall buildings ( AND even stranger, with seabed rocks laying about right outside the window ). The limitations of Game Artists ...
Actually, having 20 stories maximum would be more than sufficient for any 'Tall' buildings in Rapture. There generally was no need to build them even that tall ( and far more reasons NOT TO ). Can you imagine walking all those stairs after the elevators stopped working when Rapture's Chaos came to full fruition ? 
LATER, the Upper levels of even slightly tall ( not even 20 story ) buildings might be utilized as refuges, due to their limited ( and controllable/constrained ) access -- In the age of New Rapture.
IDEA - A Handy Auto Stair Climbing Mode for the MMORPG for all those flights of stairs ( Some games alreday have ladder facilitation in their player movement interfaces ).
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Look - Tall Buildings !!! Yes but then notice all the OTHER building which are mot very tall at all. A vast majority are 6 or fewer stories. Rapture would be the same : Some few TALL buildings built to impress ( and at great expense ) and then everything else only as tall as they need to be. 6 stories is also the practical height for not requiring Elevator(s). On The Surface, it is also low enough to be reached by Firetruck Ladders ( limited since Roman days for a similar reason ), and to be able to be constructed of Brick/Concrete and not require Steel Girders. In Rapture, the higher a building is in floors the more interior space has to be dedicated to its infrastructure - to sustain more and more occupants - stairs/elevators/ventilation/utilities/etc ...
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Rapture's Skyline - All Just A Con Job ???? :
Rapture Was built to be impressive/inspiring, but is all that interior space really used ?
That height of those sky-scrapers 40+ stories tall, Is there interior spaces inside ( particularly near the tops where they narrow down ) ? - Or are many of those stories lighted 'fakes'? An example would be the towers on the main Fontaine Futuristics buildings, which the top 2/3 is more for show than any human occupation. As narrow as they are, the interior volume ( inside the required massive walls ) would quickly dwindle to uselessness.
I would hope that only the densest part of Rapture looks like the following picture :
If those were fully occupied, 20000 people could fit pretty easily in just the buildings shown.
Fake construction of the upper sections would not need the 8 foot thick reinforced concrete walls most inhabited buildings in Rapture have ( or the foot thick Ryanium windows ) to hold out the massive sea pressure. The fake windows could be relatively thin ordinary glass. The only real structural needs would be : holding up the building's weight and preventing ocean currents from swaying/bending a building to its destruction. Faked/Decorative floors (being empty/unused) could alleviate alot of the ocean current's force by having lots of holes to let much of the current flow pass right thru the building ( think fly-swatter ). Otherwise with such tall buildings the current force has a huge amount of leverage against the foundation ( which has to anchor the building ), and also has to be transmitted thru the walls of the lower levels ( requiring them to be much stronger ).
As I've written before, there was a plentiful locally-made supply of concrete in Rapture, which could allow alot of overbuilding ( and Wales Brother's grand designs definitely were that ). Fake upper floors could also be designed to look like more than they really are ( just as in game the buildings we see which are real '3D' objects are actually 1/3rd size - Yet look impressively bigger - an optical illusion ).
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Why Should There Even Be Such Very Tall Buildings in Rapture - REALLY ??? :
Other Than Some Developers "It Looked Neat" For The Game ?? 
Can't even see that far : In real life, water absorbs light within short distances ( ~600 feet and virtually all of Bright Sunlight diminishes and is gone - completely dark/pitch black ). Any less intense light disappears at even shorter distances. SO you wouldn't see the City skyline off in the distance ( as seen in many Skybox window views ), and even adjacent building over 100 feet away quickly fading away ( interior light from windows are just not that bright ). And we have some 60+ story buildings shown which likely to be over ~600 feet tall -- It would dim out further all along that distance, and you wouldn't even see the top of the building from its foot ( just a rapid fade to blackness ). Any intentional 'Make It Look like Skyscraper' faked rows of windows cosmetic/aesthetic effect ( Art Deco was known for added 'Tower' decorations ), would be rather pointless when virtually nobody can actually see it ( thus noone would go to the expense of building such ).
Tall thin buildings also are an impractical design for Rapture and its environment of extreme water pressure - Short 'blocky' buildings are structurally much more workable and cheaper and less wasteful ( and Rapture IS hardly the situation in a Real World city center - Where limited and expensive real estate space forces building upwards ). A building with a higher Volume to Surface-Area ratio is a much much better idea. Windows are not 'an asset' ( actually its an expensive feature in Rapture ) and serve no use for ventilation ( as they did in those early skyscrapers ). As mentioned above, the inhabitants will generally have little to view. 
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Look at the actual places we went to in Rapture, and you see interiors with very few 'walls of windows'. You also see sprawling floor layouts which only go up a few stories. No interior shown is even of the tall thin building 'type'. Not-Too-Tall Interiors In-Game - Tallest interiors are like the Hotel in Welcome Center, and various Tenements, and Fontaine Futuristics, all which were little more than 6 floors tall inside. 
I would have (even in the Solo games) the buildings scaled down ( in height and number of stories maxing out at around 20 ) - Still "done for effect", but at least have them realistically be close/visible ( and EVEN THEN still requiring powerful illumination for the shortened distances to 'stand out' in the darkness ).
Huge interior spaces ( ie- big dome full of buildings ) are also prohibitive ( Note the huge girders in Paupers Drop ). Many open voluminous areas of medium size (like a Stadium) would needfully be sunk into the seabed to used the rock as part of their pressure holding structure ( and would still require having that large the roof be complicatedly supported ).
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* Most buildings in cities AREN'T this tall ( 'tall' being far more expensive to build/maintain -- and tall and VERY skinny was even worse ).
* Rapture likely didn't have a land shortage like big cities had, so there is less reason to build upward this much.
* Competing with each other ( the few ones that did ), the buildings all wouldn't be the same height ( and Rapture was built in a short period and was largely pre-planned ). A variety of DIFFERENT shapes should have been done as well.
* With the way water absorbs (even brilliant sun) light, few people could see the top of a very tall building ( so 'tall' isn't really impressive in that environment - The MMORPG tall buildings will top out at 20 stories ).
* 'Tall' in Rapture has more water current force leveraging upon the buildings - requiring a bigger/stronger foundation. 
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Pointy Tops of Buildings :
Many of Rapture's tall buildings have pointy tops and decorative features that might not have any real usefulness. Fontain Futuristics building as an example, where 1/3 of the height is decoration.
Lots of lights in/on the buildings and shining upon the buildings, so the decorative elements are made easily visible ( They were, after all, built to impress ).
Tower spikes might be useful as radio antennas, except that radio does not do well thru water (very poorly actually).
A 'pointy' narrowing building width (towards the top) leaves little useful habitable space inside. Water reservoir tanks near top of building could take up some of that space ( gravity still works for indoor plumbing ). Depending on what is in the building's top levels, they may not have to be pressurized and thus could be less substantially constructed ( they only would have to support their own weight and resist ocean currents instead of holding out the water pressure ).
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Recognize this shape ? Used over and over in many of those Skybox Views. Seriously those distant views are a '2D' texture. The many tall buildings (shortened a bit) could be varied in shape with the same effort. DERP!!!!
The MMORPG would have them alot shorter ( max 20 stories - most no more than 5 ) and of varying shapes, and many with a utilitarian squared top for most.
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Look for redress of this issue in the MMORPG.
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A Point About Really Tall Buildings (example - NYC skyline [pix] ) :
Why many of the Skybox (sea) views in the game are faulty - Too many really tall buildings ( particularly 60-Story, 'thin' ones, as the thickness of walls the water pressure requires makes usable interior space too limited to be practical ).
WHAT normally happened in real cities : with a Progression of buildings getting taller over decades - While most of Rapture was build in a fairly short period and with a limited population ( and amount of money available ). 
Real World, you don't see too many buildings of the same great height because : After one is done for 'prestige', there is not much point in building 'just as tall', particularly when it is OVERLY expensive to build so tall. A FEW buildings later might get taller for similar reason (but only a few). MOST buildings, even in those (REAL) packed cities, are far shorter than the 'tall' ones, for simple practical reasons.
Building 'upwards' in cities with limited land availability makes sense, BUT in Rapture, where there is plenty of seabed area (as the views show), SO THEN it makes ALOT LESS sense to have many tall buildings.
I keep going on about what 'tall skinny' buildings in Rapture didn't make sense ( engineeringly nor economically ).
The game's artists used the same repeated pattern (60+ stories) ridiculously over and over to show what they thought made up a Manhattan-esque Skyline/Cityscape.
In reality, they could have done much better with using 10-15 stories placed closer. BUT then THOSE would need more realistic details ( taking more effort - even if they were in static texture Skybox picture ) which the Players might quickly notice were not done properly.
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A view of a piece of the City of Los Angeles about when Rapture was being built. These are buildings built for useful interior space. Tall thin buildings have alot of interior volume taken up by 'Service Cores, including all the extra elevators. In Rapture, tall and thin is doubly bad because of the necessary THICKNESS of the Walls.
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Being "Tall" is relative. 
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==OF COURSE NOTHING IN RAPTURE COULD SURPASS THE DERPY VERTICALNESS WE SAW IN COLUMBIA==
BeyondGianourmousFactory.jpg| And in Columbia We got to LOOK DOWN on the Absurdities
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