Visited NYC this past weekend and saw multiple buildings that were at least 30-40 stories high, but the base wasn’t finished yet. Why do you keep building upwards and finishing windows instead of finishing the bottom and then doing the same?
In: Engineering
As far as the primary construction crew is concerned the base *is* finished: It is structurally complete and able to support the upper floors. At that point you move on to building the upper floors so you can fill (lease, sell) them.
Leaving the lower floors unfinished lets you hoist material through them and use the lower floors as staging areas for further construction without having to worry about damaging a finished area of the building, so the interior is usually finished out top-to-bottom.
The ground floor is the ***last*** thing you *can* finish: It’s going to be decorative lobby space (you don’t want construction crews tracking through your multimillion dollar lobby), or commercial retail space (you won’t finish that at all, you’ll rent it to a tenant and they’ll build it out the way they want it), or some combination of the two.
As far as the windows go these are usually non-structural curtain walls, but you need to put them in and enclose the basic envelope of the building before you start installing anything on the floors that might not take too kindly to the weather (plumbing, drywall, flooring, etc.) and before you can do basic climate control (at least minimum heating in winter so when you fill fire standpipes and other water lines they don’t freeze & burst).
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