A skyline is the outline or shape viewed near the horizon. It can be created by a city's overall structure, or by human intervention in a rural setting, or in nature that is formed where the sky meets buildings or the land.
City skylines serve as a pseudo-fingerprint as no two skylines are alike. For this reason, news and sports programs, television shows, and movies often display the skyline of a city to set a location. The term The Sky Line of New York City was introduced in 1896, when it was the title of a color lithograph by Charles Graham for the color supplement of the New York Journal . [1] Paul D. Spreiregen, FAIA, has called a [city] skyline "a physical representation [of a city's] facts of life ... a potential work of art ... its collective vista." [2]
High-rise buildings, including skyscrapers, are the fundamental feature of urban skylines. [3] [4] Both contours and cladding (brick or glass) make an impact on the overall appearance of a skyline.
Towers from different eras make for contrasting skylines.
San Gimignano, in Tuscany, Italy, has been described as having an "unforgettable skyline" with its competitively built towers. [5]
Some remote locations have notably striking skylines, created either by nature or by sparse human settlement in an environment not conducive to housing significant populations.
Skylines are often used as backgrounds and establishing shots in film, television programs, news websites, and in other forms of media.
Several services rank skylines based on their own subjective criteria. Emporis is one such service, which uses height and other data to give point values to buildings and add them together for skylines. The three cities it ranks highest are Hong Kong, New York City, and Singapore. [6]
A skyscraper is a tall continuously habitable building having multiple floors. Modern sources define skyscrapers as being at least 100 meters (330 ft) or 150 meters (490 ft) in height, though there is no universally accepted definition, other than being very tall high-rise buildings. Skyscrapers may host offices, hotels, residential spaces, and retail spaces.
A tower block, high-rise, apartment tower, residential tower, apartment block, block of flats, or office tower is a tall building, as opposed to a low-rise building and is defined differently in terms of height depending on the jurisdiction. It is used as a residential, office building, or other functions including hotel, retail, or with multiple purposes combined. Residential high-rise buildings are also known in some varieties of English, such as British English, as tower blocks and may be referred to as MDUs, standing for multi-dwelling units. A very tall high-rise building is referred to as a skyscraper.
Bank of America Plaza is a supertall skyscraper between Midtown Atlanta and Downtown Atlanta. At 311.8 m (1,023 ft), as of February 2024 the tower is the 23rd tallest building in the United States, the tallest building in the Southeastern region of the United States, and the tallest building in any U.S. state capital, overtaking the 250 m (820 ft), 50-story One Atlantic Center in height, which held the record as Georgia's tallest building. It has 55 stories of office space and was completed in 1992, when it was called NationsBank Plaza. Originally intended to be the headquarters for Citizens & Southern National Bank, it became NationsBank's property following its formation in the 1991 hostile takeover of C&S/Sovran by NCNB.
Emporis was a real estate data mining company with headquarters in Hamburg, Germany. The company collected data and photographs of buildings worldwide, which were published in an online database from 2000 to September 2022.
Peachtree Center is a district located in Downtown Atlanta, Georgia. Most of the structures that make up the district were designed by Atlanta architect John C. Portman Jr. A defining feature of the Peachtree Center is a network of enclosed pedestrian sky bridges suspended above the street-level, which have garnered criticism for discouraging pedestrian street life. The district is served by the Peachtree Center MARTA station, providing access to rapid transit.
Jason M. Barr is an American economist and author at Rutgers University-Newark, whose work is in the field of "skynomics", the study of skyscrapers and skylines using modern economics methods. He is the author of Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan's Skyscrapers, which chronicles the history of the Manhattan skyline from an economic perspective, and Cities in the Sky: The Quest to Build the World's Tallest Skyscrapers, which discusses how and why the world's largest cities are building their skylines. Barr's work is interdisciplinary and integrates multiple disciplines including urban studies, geography, and economic history. Barr is one of the few academic economists studying the intersection of economics and skyscraper construction.
When Charles Graham's view of New York was published, the new term used in the title, "sky line," caught on immediately.
geographers have tended to neglect the substantial impact of skyscrapers on urban life.
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