I’m not sure I follow you on the skyscrapers example.
The Burj Khalifa is about 2 times higher, and took about 3 times as much to be built ; it doesn’t look like things are getting much slower. Even better, it is 2 times higher, thus it is between 2 times and 8 times bigger (depending on how scaling laws work for civil engineering), so one could argue that it was built faster.
The slowest example, the Abraj Al-Balt, also seems to be much bigger than the other ones, so it’s not too surprising either (?)
I think their is a hidden assumption here that building “the tallest building in the world” is about as difficult to do in 2023 as it was in 1933. 2023 technology and economy are better, enabling a larger building, but the competition also have those advantages, so its a wash.
I feel this assumption is doing a lot of work throughout. Back in the 60′s building (for example) a big passenger jet was the kind of engineering project a large company might pursue. In the modern world we might also want a large passenger jet, but in order for developing it to be worth anyone’s time it needs to significantly outperform the jets already on sale on some important metric(s).
If you are engineering a new type of thing that has not come before then that requires a certain type of organisation and mindset. Maybe here its ok for the fuel efficiency to be 20% worse than it might have been if it gets the engine design finished 3 months faster.
But if you are coming into a crowded market, and you intend to make something that is fundamentally just an improvement on machines that already exist, then it is likely that you want a completely different approach. You would take the efficiency over the time saved.
I notice that (perhaps excluding the pentagon) the examples all appear to be of the first kind. A lesson that could be drawn is “doing something novel might be risky and expensive, but it is often faster than improving on an existing technology.”
Although every building is “novel” even today, they’re not “improvements on an existing building”. It’s a new site every time with a new blueprint. So your novelty point should apply, yet skyscrapers build slower now.
I do think the Burj Khalifa is also an outlier, and not representative of typical building speed, at least in the West.
I’m not sure I follow you on the skyscrapers example.
The Burj Khalifa is about 2 times higher, and took about 3 times as much to be built ; it doesn’t look like things are getting much slower. Even better, it is 2 times higher, thus it is between 2 times and 8 times bigger (depending on how scaling laws work for civil engineering), so one could argue that it was built faster.
The slowest example, the Abraj Al-Balt, also seems to be much bigger than the other ones, so it’s not too surprising either (?)
I think their is a hidden assumption here that building “the tallest building in the world” is about as difficult to do in 2023 as it was in 1933. 2023 technology and economy are better, enabling a larger building, but the competition also have those advantages, so its a wash.
I feel this assumption is doing a lot of work throughout. Back in the 60′s building (for example) a big passenger jet was the kind of engineering project a large company might pursue. In the modern world we might also want a large passenger jet, but in order for developing it to be worth anyone’s time it needs to significantly outperform the jets already on sale on some important metric(s).
If you are engineering a new type of thing that has not come before then that requires a certain type of organisation and mindset. Maybe here its ok for the fuel efficiency to be 20% worse than it might have been if it gets the engine design finished 3 months faster.
But if you are coming into a crowded market, and you intend to make something that is fundamentally just an improvement on machines that already exist, then it is likely that you want a completely different approach. You would take the efficiency over the time saved.
I notice that (perhaps excluding the pentagon) the examples all appear to be of the first kind. A lesson that could be drawn is “doing something novel might be risky and expensive, but it is often faster than improving on an existing technology.”
Although every building is “novel” even today, they’re not “improvements on an existing building”. It’s a new site every time with a new blueprint. So your novelty point should apply, yet skyscrapers build slower now.
I do think the Burj Khalifa is also an outlier, and not representative of typical building speed, at least in the West.