Why are skyscrapers built thin, instead of stacking 100 arenas on top of each other?
In: Engineering
Well, besides having a bunch of dark rooms with no windows, the square/cube law. Imagine a cube 1m x 1m x 1m. Surface area is 6m squared, volume is 1m cubed. Double the dimension so its a 2m cube, and now the surface are is 24m squared, and the volume 8m cubed.
So while you only doubled the height, width and length, the surface area increased by 4 times, and the volume, and therefore the mass, by 8 times. This can be offset by tapering the building so its thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top, but only to a certain extent. Eventually, either no material can support the pressure, or it sinks into the ground from its own weight, or you have to build a base so wide that it becomes impractical. Imagine a pyramid 10km tall, but also 10km wide or more at the base.
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