urbanMSP

haha oops I always thought the Wrigley Building was across the street, but that's the Tribune building I think eh brain fart on my part.

Yikes just mapped OKC, they have literal empty grass lots 4 blocks from that tower, not even parking lots, just empty lots. To me its just kind of bizarre to build such a massive thing when there is so much empty space just a couple hundred feet away.

Tell me about it! Or how about when a tall/supertall is next to just about nothing, and you can see the first 10 floors or even the lobby......from a skyline view! I see this mostly in Southern cities for some reason. What I don't understand about it is the economics of the situation. It's as if the economy is telling us that this block is extremely valuable and it only makes sense to max out your FAR and put up a supertall here, yet the block across the street is completely worthless and, even after the supertall is built next door, the value of the land is not worthy of anything more than a 3 story parking ramp. Something doesn't add up...

Relevant:

http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/06/w ... re/373493/

The article indicates that these projects buy adjacent air rights. To preserve views or to allow the project to expand outward to increase floorspace?

It's the latter, although I suppose the former would be an added benefit.

We haven't seen a great deal of that locally, although I do seem to recall that the old Nicollet condo tower had proposed to buy the air rights above the Handicraft building to allow it to be taller than the base FAR would have allowed.

EDIT: Just to be clear, the underlying zoning is (I believe) similar in NYC and MPLS, where height isn't limited, but FAR is, so that if you want to build very tall, you need to have more land that you're not going to build very tall on to offset it.

It's apparently just fog: http://www.thenational.ae/uae/dubai-pol ... is-on-fire