This diagram was inspired by a magazine article I glanced at about how the world's tallest building is about to be built in Chicago. It shows how I, in my ignorance of the more modern and advanced techniques of building very tall buildings, envisage one could build a tall building.
The floors are octagonal in shape, with long wings at the four corners. This leaves each office site with an unobstructed view; the four wings act as buttresses. Thus instead of only having load-bearing components of the building in the core, it is expected that the "utility" area of the wings will include support columns sharing space with washrooms and elevator shafts. Note that if one goes just past the area of the utility part of the wings on the ground floor into the inner part of the central octagon, one will have a good spot to put elevator shafts that span a considerable portion of the building's height.
Of course, the building's shape is a particularly bad one for catching the wind, even if it is a shape with high rigidity. Putting holes in the buttress wings where they adjoin the central octagon on some floors (thus isolating the wings from the center horizontally) may be one way to deal with this.
A scale is now shown in the diagram. Originally, I had envisioned the "wings" of the design consisting of an office section that is 24' wide, a hallway that is 6' wide, and a utility section that is 30' wide. Upon reflection, however, I think the utility section in the wings could be reduced to 12' wide, changing the thickness of the wings from 90' to 72', and therefore the width of the building as a whole from just over 700 feet down to about 570 feet, and the scale shown reflects this.
Note that the drawing of the building shows only the bottom half or so. Here is an attempt of mine to draw the whole building as shown in the plan above, although I omitted one layer near the top due to a slight problem with scaling, and shrunk the top two layers shown from 10 stories to 5 stories.
Copyright (c) 2000 John J. G. Savard