Justification for ‘Scrapping the Sky’ A Comprehensive International Review of Skyscrapers/High-Rise Buildings from an Urban Design Perspective

The magic ‘vertical’ has always been a spiritually distinctive preoccupation of architecture throughout history. The paper intends to examine, from a series of perspectives, if the high-rise in principle is a good thing. The focus is on urban design implications, however engineering challenges and their design solutions are inseparable aspects of the problematic. It is also to further demystify some ideologies still attached to their widespread application. It concludes that there is a new awareness evolving about high-rise design that is superior to previous approaches.