Gregor Craigie - Why Humans Build Up: The Rise of Towers, Temples and Skyscrapers

Markus Hanke/Getty Images

Orca Book Publishers is proud of the hard work our authors do and of the important stories they create. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it or did not check it out from a library provider, then the author has not received royalties for this book. The ebook you are reading is licensed for single use only and may not be copied, printed, resold or given away. If you are interested in using this book in a classroom setting, we have digital subscriptions with multi user, simultaneous access to our books, or classroom licenses available for purchase. For more information, please contact .

ivaluecanadianstories.ca

I can still remember the first time I saw a skyscraper. I was five years old and sitting in the back seat of my dads car. We drove over the top of a hill and I saw what looked like a giant white rocket, about half a mile (one kilometer) in front of us. It had a big red ring near the top and looked like a steel needle pointing straight up at the sky.

Whats that? I asked.

Thats the Calgary Tower, my dad replied. Its the tallest building in the city.

The tower was only five years older than me, and it looked modern, new and impossibly high. I pressed my cheek up against the glass as we drove past and tried to look straight up the long, smooth concrete cylinder. It was so high!

I peppered my dad with questions for the rest of the car ride and for weeks after. How tall is it? How did they make it? Whats at the top? Will it fall over? The questions kept coming until he finally took me and my sister to visit the tower. The elevator took about a minute to lift us to the viewing deck, almost 620 feet (190 meters) above the ground. When we looked out the big windows I was amazed by the incredible views. I could see the tops of all the other big buildings surrounding the tower, thousands of houses beyond them and the spectacular Rocky Mountains off in the distance.

I have been interested in tall towers ever since that day. But it wasnt until I grew up and became a dad myself that I really started to wonder why we build them. I was showing my sons a photo of the Burj Khalifaa skyscraper in Dubai that is four times taller than the Calgary Towerwhen one of them asked me a simple question. Why did they make it so high?

Thats a good question, and one that could be asked of every tall building thats ever been built.

One of the biggest reasons for going high today is because the worlds population is growing. With more people, we will need more space for those people to live, learn and work in. At the same time, its important to preserve what wilderness we have left, like the forests and jungles that provide habitat for endangered species and act as carbon sinks, removing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the air.

But there are many more reasons why people have been building tall structures for centuries. Castle walls kept people on the inside safe. Utility towers transmitted television and mobile phone signals. And observatories gave people a birds-eye view of what surrounded them. There are some good reasons for building up, and a few bad ones as well. But its worth thinking more about why were doing it, because its safe to assume we will have to keep building higher in the future.

The Calgary Tower was built in the 1960s to celebrate Canadas centennial and bring tourists into Calgarys downtown core. abdallahh from Montral, Canada/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0

When it was first built, the 626-foot (191-meter) reinforced-concrete observation tower was the tallest building in Calgary. Its no longer the tallest, but it is still prominent on the citys skyline. Y Du Jin Ye / EyeEm/Getty Images

One

Security

Building Tall to stay safe

S kyscrapers look like modern inventions, with striking vertical lines of glass and steel stretching high into the sky. Most architects and historians agree that the first skyscrapers were built in Chicago and New York in the late 1800s and most of the really high towers were built in the last few decades. But people have been building tall structures for thousands of years. And one of the very first reasons was for securitypeople built tall structures to keep themselves safe.