Tower Block - History

History

High-rise apartment buildings had already appeared in antiquity: the insulae in ancient Rome and several other cities in the Roman Empire, some of which might have reached up to ten or more storeys, one reportedly having 200 stairs. Because of the destruction caused by poorly-built high-rise insulae collapsing, several Roman emperors, beginning with Augustus (r. 30 BC - 14 AD), set limits of 20–25 metres for multi-storey buildings, but met with limited success, as these limits were often ignored despite the likelihood of taller insulae collapsing. The lower floors were typically occupied by either shops or wealthy families, while the upper storeys were rented out to the lower classes. Surviving Oxyrhynchus Papyri indicate that seven-storey buildings even existed in provincial towns, such as in third century AD Hermopolis in Roman Egypt.

In Arab Egypt, the initial capital city was Fustat. It housed many high-rise residential buildings, some seven stories tall that could reportedly accommodate hundreds of people. Al-Muqaddasi, in the tenth century, described them as resembling minarets, while Nasir Khusraw, in the early eleventh century, described some of them rising up to fourteen storeys, with roof gardens on the top storey complete with ox-drawn water wheels for irrigating them. By the 16th century, Cairo also had high-rise apartment buildings where the two lower floors were for commercial and storage purposes and the multiple stories above them were rented out to tenants.

The skyline of many important medieval cities was dominated by large numbers of high-rising urban towers which fulfilled defensive but also representative purposes. The residential Towers of Bologna numbered between 80 to 100 at a time, the largest of which still rise to 97.2 m. In Florence, a law of 1251 decreed that all urban buildings should be reduced to a height of less than 26 m, the regulation immediately put into effect. Even medium-sized towns such as San Gimignano are known to have featured seventy-two towers up to 51m in height.

Tower blocks were built in the Yemeni city of Shibam in the sixteenth century. The houses of Shibam are all made out of mud bricks, but about five hundred of them are tower houses, which rise five to sixteen stories high, with each floor having one or two apartments. This technique of building was implemented in order to protect residents from Bedouin attacks. While Shibam has existed for around two thousand years, most of the city's houses come mainly from the sixteenth century. The city has the tallest mud buildings in the world, with some of them over 30 metres (100 feet) high. Shibam has been called "one of the oldest and best examples of urban planning based on the principle of vertical construction" or "Manhattan of the desert".

Currently, the tallest high-rise apartment building in the world is Chicago's John Hancock Center, constructed under the supervision of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and completed in 1969. The building has one hundred stories and stands 344 metres tall.