Daniel sent us this one — he's noticed we've spent a lot of time dunking on high-rises for being expensive density cheats, and he wants to level the conversation out. The core question is: what are the genuine advantages of high-rise development, how do we minimize the friction points like elevator costs and shared maintenance so these buildings aren't just luxury vanity boxes, and — this is the part I find genuinely interesting — can you ever customize a thirtieth-floor apartment, or are you stuck with a vanilla developer box forever?
I love this prompt. We've been the prosecution for a while. Today we're the defense — but not uncritically. We're going to ask: under what conditions do high-rises actually deliver on their promises? And the customization question is the fresh angle here. Most people just accept that high-rise living means cookie-cutter. It doesn't have to.
Let's start with the obvious tension. The anti-high-rise case is well-rehearsed. Elevators are expensive. Shared costs are high. They're not actually density-efficient compared to six-story mid-rises — Tokyo gets most of its residential density from mid-rise construction, not skyscrapers. And yet cities keep building them, and people keep wanting to live in them. So either the entire global real estate market is irrational, or we're missing something.
We're missing something. And I think the problem is that the conversation has gotten completely polarized. You're either a "towers are evil" person or a "towers are the only way" person. There's no typology of good towers versus bad towers. And that's what we need to build today.
A taxonomy of the sky. I'm in.
Let's start with the genuine advantages — the ones that survive scrutiny. And I want to lead with daylight, because this is the thing that's most underappreciated. There was a study out of the University of Toronto's Building Science lab in 2024 that looked at daylight autonomy in different building forms. What they found was that towers with a floorplate under 750 square meters achieved about forty percent better daylight autonomy than deep-plan mid-rises.
Daylight autonomy means what, exactly — how much natural light a unit gets without needing artificial lighting?
The percentage of occupied hours where daylight alone provides sufficient illumination. And here's why this matters. In a six-story mid-rise, only the top two floors get unobstructed sun for most of the day. The lower floors are shaded by adjacent buildings, by street trees, by the building's own mass. But a well-oriented slender tower — say, twenty-five to forty stories with a small floorplate — can give eighty percent or more of its units direct sunlight for at least part of the day. That's not just pleasant. It has measurable effects on energy use, on mental health, on sleep quality.
The vertical dimension isn't just about stacking people — it's about getting them above the shadow line.
And this is where the "point tower" model that Vancouver pioneered in the nineties really shines. Slender towers on podiums, spaced apart, oriented to maximize solar access. Compare that to the "slab tower" model you see in Toronto — wide, long buildings that create permanent shadow canyons and wind tunnels at street level. Same height, same density, completely different outcome.
Vancouver versus Toronto — the polite Canadian urban design war.
It's real. And Vancouver's approach also handles the second genuine advantage better, which is ground-level public realm. When you do a podium-and-tower properly, the tower's footprint is small. That leaves room for plazas, retail, green space at grade. The Seagram Building in New York is the classic example — Mies van der Rohe set the tower back and created that granite plaza, and suddenly you've got a clear public-private split.
The failure mode of that is Pruitt-Igoe.
Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis was "tower in a park" — but the park was just undifferentiated green space with no programming, no retail, no reason for anyone to be there. It became a no-man's-land. The difference is active versus passive ground-floor use. When you put retail, cafes, services in the podium, you get foot traffic. You get eyes on the street. Jane Jacobs actually acknowledged this in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" — she wasn't opposed to towers per se. She was opposed to superblocks that killed the street grid.
She wanted density concentration for sidewalk vitality. She just wanted it on a human scale at ground level.
And high-rises, counterintuitively, can deliver that. Because when you concentrate two hundred units on a single site, you've got two hundred households worth of foot traffic hitting the street every day. That supports retail that would fail in a lower-density area. The coffee shop on the corner of a tower block has a built-in customer base that a coffee shop in a six-unit brownstone neighborhood doesn't.
Which brings us to the third advantage — amenity concentration economics. This is the one that I think most people don't think about.
This is huge. Let me give you the numbers. According to the Urban Land Institute's 2023 report on amenity economics, the per-unit cost of a shared amenity drops by roughly sixty percent when you go from thirty units to two hundred units.
A thirty-unit mid-rise can't support a full-time concierge. A two-hundred-unit tower can.
Not just a concierge. A gym, a rooftop garden, a co-working lounge, a bike storage room, a package delivery system. These things become economically viable at scale. And this isn't luxury — it's a different cost structure. In a thirty-unit building, if you want a gym, you're paying a significant fraction of that gym's cost yourself. In a two-hundred-unit building, your share is tiny.
The building becomes a kind of club. You're buying into shared infrastructure that you couldn't afford individually.
And this matters for affordability in a way that gets overlooked. If you're a young family and you want a play space for your kids, in a mid-rise you need a private backyard or you're schlepping to a public park. In a well-designed high-rise, there's a dedicated children's playroom on the amenities floor. That's not a luxury feature — it's a practical one that gets amortized across two hundred households.
Those are the three advantages that actually survive scrutiny: daylight distribution, ground-level public realm creation, and amenity concentration economics. There's a fourth one that's softer but I think it's real — wayfinding and urban legibility. Towers create visual landmarks.
Kevin Lynch talked about this in "The Image of the City" back in 1960. People navigate cities by landmarks, paths, edges, nodes, and districts. A well-placed tower gives you an orientation point. You can see it from a distance. You know where you are relative to it. That's not trivial for how a city feels.
The Empire State Building is basically the North Star of Manhattan. Even if you've never been there, you know which way is uptown.
That legibility has economic spillovers. Landmark buildings increase foot traffic in their vicinity. They become meeting points. They anchor retail corridors.
Those are the genuine, non-spurious advantages. Now let's talk about the friction points. Because we promised to be honest, and the friction points are real.
Let's start with the big one: elevators. The single biggest operational cost in a high-rise, and the single biggest source of resident frustration. But this is a design problem, not an inherent flaw of the form.
The technology has actually moved. It's not just "more elevators" anymore.
Not at all. Destination dispatch systems — which have been common in office buildings for a while — are now making their way into residential. Here's how it works: instead of pressing an up or down button and waiting, you enter your floor on a keypad in the lobby, and the system assigns you to a specific elevator car. It groups people going to nearby floors together. Otis released their Gen3 system in 2025 with predictive AI routing, and the numbers are substantial: wait times drop by thirty to fifty percent, energy use drops by twenty-five percent.
The elevator doesn't stop at every third floor like a milk train.
And then there's the twin elevator system — two cabs sharing one shaft, one above the other, moving independently. That can increase capacity by forty percent without adding shaft space. You're getting more people moved with less building core devoted to elevators.
Which means more sellable floor area. The economics actually work.
The elevator shaft is dead space from a revenue perspective. If you can make it more efficient, you're reducing the cost per square foot of every unit in the building.
Friction point one — elevator costs and wait times — is solvable with existing technology. What about friction point two, the shared maintenance cost horror story?
The special assessment nightmare. Your condo board tells you the roof needs replacing and suddenly you owe forty thousand dollars. This is real. But it's a governance problem, not a building-form problem.
Compare two models. In Singapore, condominium developments are required by law to contribute one point five percent of each unit's assessed value per year to a sinking fund. That's mandatory. You can't opt out. You can't vote to defer maintenance to keep fees low. The result is that Singaporean high-rises, even forty-year-old ones, are generally in excellent condition. In the United States, the average condo reserve contribution is about zero point three percent of unit value. Boards routinely defer maintenance to keep monthly fees low, and then the bill comes due all at once.
It's not that high-rises inherently have higher maintenance costs — it's that the US model systematically underfunds maintenance.
And there's a regulatory fix for this. Mandatory minimum reserve fund contributions, phased in over time, with independent engineering assessments every five years. Several states have started moving in this direction — Florida after the Surfside collapse in 2021, most notably. But it's still not the norm.
The Singapore model also suggests that high-rises can age gracefully if you actually maintain them. The "towers become slums" narrative is a choice, not an inevitability.
That connects to something important: the misconception that high-rises are inherently luxury because they're expensive to build. The reality is that the construction cost premium for a high-rise over a mid-rise is about fifteen to twenty-five percent, according to the Turner Building Cost Index. That's real, but it's not insane. And it can be offset by smaller unit sizes, by raw-shell delivery, and by the land cost savings. On a per-unit basis, the land cost in a two-hundred-unit tower is a fraction of what it is in a thirty-unit mid-rise.
The expensive part isn't the height per se — it's the structural requirements, the wind loading, the fire safety systems, the elevators. Those are fixed costs that get amortized over more units.
And if you build two hundred units instead of thirty, those fixed costs get spread thin. The marginal cost of adding another floor, once you've already got the foundation, the core, and the elevator shaft, is relatively low.
Which brings us to friction point three — the one that prompted this whole episode. Cookie-cutter layouts. The vanilla box problem. Can you actually make a high-rise unit feel like your own space, or are you stuck with whatever the developer's interior designer chose?
This is where it gets interesting. And I want to introduce a concept that's been around since the nineteen sixties but has never really broken through in North America: open building.
This is the Dutch architect John Habraken, right?
John Habraken, yes. He wrote "Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing" in 1961. The core idea is separating the "support" — the structure, the core, the services — from the "infill" — the partitions, finishes, fixtures. The support is the building's skeleton. The infill is everything the occupant controls.
The building provides bones. You provide the flesh.
In a high-rise, this means using a post-tensioned concrete slab with no interior columns. The only fixed structural elements are the core — elevators, stairs, plumbing risers — and the perimeter columns. Everything inside the unit is open. Then you put in a raised access floor for all the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing runs. Tenants can move non-load-bearing walls, change flooring, reroute outlets — all without touching the structure.
You're not calling a structural engineer every time you want to move a wall. The wall isn't holding anything up.
And this isn't theoretical. There's a project that I think is the best case study we have — the Custom Condo project in Tokyo, completed in 2024 by Nikken Sekkei. Forty stories, and every unit was delivered as a raw concrete shell with a "utility wall" containing all the plumbing and electrical risers. Buyers got to choose from twelve pre-approved interior layouts, or they could design their own using a parametric tool that checked structural and MEP constraints in real time.
A parametric design tool for apartment layouts. So you open an app, drag a wall, and it tells you if it'll work?
The tool modeled load paths, ventilation requirements, fire-rating requirements, and plumbing runs. If your proposed layout violated any constraints, it flagged them and suggested alternatives. The result was that eighty percent of buyers customized their layout in some way. And the building achieved LEED Platinum because there was zero demolition waste from tenant fit-outs. No tearing out a perfectly good kitchen because you wanted it on the other wall.
Zero demolition waste. That's enormous. In a typical condo building, every unit that gets renovated generates dumpsters of debris — drywall, flooring, cabinets. If you're starting from a raw shell and building up, there's nothing to demolish.
That's a cost saving too. The developer doesn't spend money on finishes that the buyer is going to rip out anyway. The buyer pays for exactly what they want. The raw shell costs about thirty percent less than a finished unit.
This is actually a path to affordability. If you can buy a raw shell for thirty percent less and finish it over time as you have money, you're not paying the developer's markup on finishes, and you're not paying for demolition of finishes you didn't want.
And with construction costs up eighteen percent since 2022 in most US markets, according to the Turner Building Cost Index from the first quarter of this year, anything that reduces upfront cost without subsidies is worth paying attention to.
Why isn't this the standard model? If it works in Tokyo, why are we still getting vanilla boxes in every North American tower?
First, developer inertia. The model works — you sell finished units to buyers who don't want to think about construction. Most developers aren't in the business of selling shells. Second, lender risk aversion. Banks are more comfortable lending on a building full of finished, appraisable units than on a building full of shells whose final value depends on what the buyer does with them.
Third, building codes.
Building codes, yes. Most US and Canadian codes require fire-rated separations between units. Traditionally, that means fixed walls with multiple layers of Type X drywall. Movable partitions that maintain fire ratings are more complicated. But there are workarounds. The 2025 International Building Code update includes a new appendix for "adaptable dwelling units" that explicitly allows demountable fire-rated wall systems. Two layers of Type X drywall on a track system, designed to be demounted and reinstalled without compromising the fire separation.
The code is actually starting to catch up.
And there's a cultural barrier too. North American buyers have been conditioned to expect a finished product. The idea of buying a concrete shell and finishing it yourself sounds like a construction project, not a home purchase. But the Tokyo example shows that when you provide the tools and the pre-approved options, people engage with it.
It's like the difference between buying a suit off the rack and having one tailored. Most people buy off the rack because tailoring sounds complicated and expensive. But if the tailor hands you a tablet and says "pick your fabric, pick your lapel width, pick your lining," suddenly it's approachable.
That's exactly the right analogy. And the parametric design tool is the tablet. It makes customization accessible to people who aren't architects.
Let's go deeper on the Tokyo project. You mentioned the utility wall concept — what does that actually look like?
Imagine one wall in your apartment that runs floor to ceiling and contains every service connection in the unit. All the plumbing supply and drain lines, all the electrical panels, all the data and communication cables. Everything branches off from that wall. The kitchen sink backs onto it. The bathroom is adjacent to it. If you want to add an outlet somewhere else in the unit, you run conduit through the raised floor from the utility wall to that spot. You never touch the building's core risers.
The utility wall is the spine. Everything else is flexible.
Because the slab is post-tensioned and column-free, you can put walls anywhere. Want an open loft layout? Want three small bedrooms? Move the walls. Want to change it five years later when you have a kid? Demount the partitions, reinstall them in a new configuration.
This is what converted industrial lofts have always offered — open floor plates, high ceilings, no interior columns. Why did we decide that new construction couldn't do the same thing?
Because we optimized for speed and predictability over flexibility. A developer wants to put up a building, sell the units, and move on. Standardized layouts make that easy. The open building model requires a different business model — one where the developer sells shells and the fit-out happens over a longer timeline.
The Tokyo project suggests the timeline isn't actually longer. If eighty percent of buyers are customizing anyway, they're making those decisions before they move in. The parametric tool lets them do it quickly.
The developer benefits too. They're not carrying the cost of finishes during construction. They're not dealing with change orders when buyers want to upgrade the countertops. They hand over a shell, the buyer handles the rest.
Let's talk about the other regulatory barrier you mentioned — the Singapore model for reserve funds. How would that actually work in a North American context?
The Singapore model is elegant because it's mandatory and it's tied to unit value. If your unit is worth five hundred thousand dollars, you contribute seventy-five hundred dollars a year to the sinking fund. That's non-negotiable. The fund can only be used for capital replacements and major repairs — roof, elevators, facade, mechanical systems. It can't be raided for operating expenses.
The US model is basically "hope the board is responsible.
Which, as anyone who's ever been on a condo board knows, is a recipe for deferred maintenance. Nobody wants to be the board that raises fees. So you kick the can down the road, and eventually the elevator breaks and suddenly everyone owes thirty thousand dollars.
The fix is regulatory, not architectural. Mandatory reserve fund contributions, phased in over time.
It doesn't have to be one point five percent. Even zero point eight percent would be transformative compared to the current US average of zero point three. The key is that it's mandatory and it's based on an independent engineering assessment of the building's expected capital needs.
Let's circle back to the elevator technology for a moment. You mentioned destination dispatch and twin systems. Are these actually showing up in residential buildings now, or is this still mostly commercial?
It's crossing over. Otis's Gen3 system was designed specifically with residential in mind — the AI routing learns traffic patterns over time. It knows that the thirtieth floor leaves for work at seven forty-five and pre-positions a car accordingly. Schindler has their PORT system, which integrates with building access control — you swipe your fob, it knows what floor you're going to, it assigns an elevator.
The elevator knows your schedule better than you do.
In a slightly unsettling way, yes. But the practical benefit is that the wait time for an elevator in a forty-story residential tower can be comparable to the wait time in a ten-story building with a conventional system. That changes the livability equation significantly.
The energy savings from not stopping at every floor?
Twenty-five percent is the figure Otis claims for the Gen3. That's substantial when you consider that elevators can account for five to ten percent of a high-rise's total energy consumption.
Between destination dispatch, twin systems, and better motor efficiency, the elevator problem is solvable. It's just not being solved in most buildings because developers are optimizing for upfront cost, not lifetime operating cost.
That's a recurring theme across all of these friction points. The technology exists. The design patterns exist. The regulatory models exist. What's missing is the will to implement them, and in some cases the regulatory framework to require them.
Let's pull this together. We've got three genuine advantages — daylight, public realm, amenity economics. We've got three friction points — elevators, maintenance costs, cookie-cutter layouts — and for each one, there's a fix. Destination dispatch and twin systems for elevators. Mandatory sinking funds for maintenance. Open building with utility walls and parametric design tools for customization.
The fixes aren't speculative. They're deployed and proven. Vancouver's point towers have been working for thirty years. Singapore's sinking fund model has been working for decades. The Tokyo Custom Condo project is four years old and the data is solid. The pieces exist. They just haven't been assembled into a standard practice in most markets.
What does a "good high-rise" look like, if we were writing the spec sheet?
I'd say four criteria. First, floorplate under 750 square meters. That's the threshold from the Toronto study where daylight autonomy really improves. Second, destination dispatch elevators with predictive routing — not because it's fancy, but because it directly affects quality of life and operating costs. Third, a healthy reserve fund — at least ten percent of the annual operating budget, with mandatory contributions and independent engineering assessments. Fourth, non-load-bearing interior walls with a utility wall system, so units can be reconfigured.
For someone who's looking to buy or rent in a high-rise, these are the questions to ask. Don't just look at the finishes. Ask about the floorplate size. Ask about the elevator system. Ask to see the reserve fund study. Ask whether the interior walls are structural or partition.
If the developer offers a raw shell option — take it seriously. You're not just saving money upfront. You're getting a space that actually works for how you live, not for how a focus group in a marketing study lives.
The luxury is in the finishes, not in the space.
Finishes are the easiest thing to change. The structure is what you're stuck with. I'd rather have a column-free open plan with a utility wall and basic finishes than a chopped-up layout with imported stone.
Let's address one more misconception before we wrap up the core discussion. There's this idea that high-rises are always more expensive per square foot than mid-rises. You mentioned the fifteen to twenty-five percent construction premium. But that's not the whole story.
It's not. On a per-unit basis, the land cost is lower because you're spreading it across more units. The shared amenity cost is lower for the same reason. And if you're doing raw-shell delivery, the finish cost is zero — the buyer pays that separately. So the total cost of occupancy can actually be competitive with a mid-rise, especially in cities where land is expensive.
In cities where land is cheap, you probably shouldn't be building high-rises anyway. The form follows the land economics.
The case for high-rises is strongest where land is scarce and expensive. That's why Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, Vancouver build them. Not because they're trying to maximize density per se, but because the land cost makes height economical.
Which connects back to something we've said before — the elevator is the gatekeeper of whether high-rise living works at all. If you can't move people efficiently, the whole thing falls apart. But the technology has caught up. We're just not deploying it.
That's really the thesis of this whole episode. The skyscraper isn't inherently good or bad. It's a tool. The question is whether we use it as a blunt instrument or a precision instrument. For about seventy years, we've been using it as a blunt instrument — slab towers with deep floorplates, conventional elevators, cookie-cutter layouts, underfunded reserves. The evidence suggests we can do better. We just haven't chosen to.
The next time you see a new tower proposal in your city, don't reflexively oppose it. Don't reflexively support it either. Ask the right questions. What's the floorplate size? Is there a podium with active ground-floor use? What's the elevator system? Can units be customized? The form isn't the enemy. Bad design is.
I think the customization question is where the next decade of innovation is going to happen. The Tokyo project proved it's possible. The 2025 IBC update opened the door in North America. As construction costs keep rising and housing affordability gets worse, the raw-shell model becomes more attractive — not just for luxury buyers who want a bespoke penthouse, but for middle-income buyers who want to get into a unit they can afford and finish it over time.
It's basically the sweat equity model applied to high-rise living. You buy the shell, you do the fit-out yourself or with a contractor you hire, and you end up with a customized space for less money than a finished developer unit.
Because you're not demolishing anything, it's greener. Just a shell that gets built out once.
There's an open question here that I think is worth sitting with. If the open building model is so promising, why hasn't it been adopted more widely in North America? We mentioned developer inertia, lender risk aversion, building codes. But I think there's something deeper — a cultural assumption that a finished home is a product you buy, not a process you participate in.
The North American housing market is built around the idea of the move-in-ready product. The Tokyo model requires a different relationship between buyer and building — one where the buyer is an active participant in the design process. That's not how most people think about buying a condo.
That might be changing. People are more comfortable with customization in other domains — they configure their cars online, they design their own sneakers. The parametric design tool that Nikken Sekkei built for the Tokyo project is essentially a configurator for apartments. If that becomes standard, the cultural barrier might dissolve faster than we expect.
There's a generational dimension. Younger buyers who've grown up with digital tools might be more comfortable with the idea of designing their own space than older buyers who expect a finished product.
We've made the case. High-rises have genuine advantages — daylight distribution, amenity concentration, public realm creation, urban legibility. The friction points are real but solvable with technology that exists today. And the customization question, which is the one that prompted this episode, has a clear answer: yes, you can customize a high-rise unit without structural compromise, using open building principles, utility walls, and parametric design tools. It's been done.
The broader takeaway is that we need to stop having the same stale debate about whether high-rises are good or bad. The question is: what kind of high-rise? Under what conditions? With what design choices? A good high-rise can outperform a good mid-rise on multiple dimensions. A bad high-rise is worse than almost anything else. The form doesn't determine the outcome — the design does.
Which is true of almost everything in architecture, really. The form is never destiny. The details are destiny.
The details we've focused on today — slender floorplates, destination dispatch elevators, mandatory reserve funds, open building systems — are the ones that separate the towers people love living in from the ones they can't wait to leave.
For anyone listening who's in the market for a high-rise unit, or who's involved in approving one in their city, here's your checklist. Floorplate under 750 square meters. Destination dispatch elevators. Reserve fund at ten percent of annual operating budget or higher. Non-load-bearing interior walls. And if there's a raw shell option, take it seriously.
For the policy folks listening: the Singapore sinking fund model and the IBC adaptable dwelling unit appendix are the two regulatory changes that would do the most to make high-rises more livable and more affordable. They're not radical. They're proven. They just need to be adopted.
One final thought. The skyscraper is about a hundred and forty years old at this point — the Home Insurance Building in Chicago went up in 1885. For most of that history, we've been figuring out how to make them taller, stronger, safer. The next frontier isn't structural — it's experiential. How do we make a tower feel like a home, not a hotel? How do we give people agency over their own space when they're three hundred feet in the air? That's the interesting question, and I think we're just starting to answer it.
And the answer isn't "don't build towers." It's "build better towers.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In 1937, the Icelandic mathematician Ólafur Daníelsson published a proof establishing the largest known prime number expressible as the sum of three consecutive primes — a record that stood unbroken for twenty-nine years until it was quietly toppled by a Norwegian dairy accountant whose theorem was lost in a journal fire and only rediscovered in 2014.
A Norwegian dairy accountant.
The man who makes you feel like you've accomplished nothing with your life.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Our producer is Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review — it helps other curious listeners find the show. We're at myweirdprompts.I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. Build better towers.
