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There has been some discussion of architecture lately. Have you considered how the square–cube law affects building design?
Using the International Residential Code's prescriptive tables, it is easy to design a code-compliant 30-foot (9-meter), 2700-ft2 (250-m2) cubic house. With the International Fire Code's occupancy rules, we can assume that such a house can contain 13 people. But what if your scope suddenly changes and you need to design a 60-foot, 21600-ft2, 108-person apartment building?
Obviously, dead load and live load will increase by a factor of eight, and wind load will increase by a factor of four. Therefore, we can generate a slapdash design by simply: (1) octupling all the stud and footing area, which resists the dead load and live load; (2) quadrupling the layers of sheathing, which resists the shear force of the wind; and (3) multiplying the depths of all the truss joists and girders by three, which will increase their resistance to dead loads and live loads by nine.
As they say on 4chan: Wa la!
I always thought the main problems with just scaling up a cube were:
People will complain about the lack of natural light in the interior rooms. For example Munger Hall. I personally think this is way overblown, especially for college students staying out until 4 AM and waking up at 11 AM. Or people in Minneapolis with no sun for normal at home hours in the winter, and the sun waking you up at 4 AM in the summer. With high CRI, high intensity, fresnel lens adjusted, power efficient LEDs atifical lighting can be better than the sun. Completely controllable timing and intensity, no unwanted solar heating, controlled glare, controlled color temperature, etc.
The mechanical integrations eat up much of the cost savings of the structure. Isolating and running the HVAC for that many units requires a bunch of ducting runs, eating up interior volume. Additional expensive and loud air handling units are required to over come the static resistance of all the ducting. Times 2 for the plumbing. This is why it's so hard to convert a space designed for a cube farm to residential use. You can feed an open space with a single giant plenum, but individual dwelling units require individual ducting for air quality.
Of course, you can overcome these by only scaling on the z-axis, but then you lose much of your scaling law advantage. You also run into other scaling problems, for example The Mile-High Illinois, where you would have eaten up most of the lower floor space with elevators.
That wiki article is almost as detached from reality as its subject. Love it.
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