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I have an idea on how many people can work and live inside each of the three chosen shapes.

I've received nothing on a reasonable cross-section of each shape.

The third episode features an unsanitary subject: Plumbing.

enter image description here

This sort of mapping is practical in an ordinary building, but will it work on an eight-square-mile pyramid, a four-mile-tall-six-wide cylinder and a cube spanning 140 square miles? If the answer is no, then what other methods of plumbing must be taken into consideration?

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  • $\begingroup$ the layout will definitely not work for the big building and what you need is, to begin with, systems of skyscrapers - they will work + you will need better cooling system for you bigger building $\endgroup$
    – MolbOrg
    Commented Feb 18, 2017 at 1:17
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    $\begingroup$ Unsanitary? Plumbers have saved more lives than doctors. $\endgroup$
    – Mazura
    Commented Feb 18, 2017 at 1:58
  • $\begingroup$ Very cool, not too many people ever even think about stuff like this, unless it's going to become a plot point. $\endgroup$
    – Paul TIKI
    Commented Feb 18, 2017 at 19:24
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    $\begingroup$ Rather than looking at single-family houses as your baseline, did you look at large apartment and office buildings to see how they lay out their plumbing? $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 19, 2017 at 5:20

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The ultimate shape of your building or its facade makes no difference. Almost all buildings are made out of a series of rectangles, no matter what they look like, and with good reason (manufacturing). Take for instance, Sears' tower.

enter image description here

This building style could easily produce nearly any shape. The sections would just have to end at the correct heights and be capped with, or have a facade with, the correct geometric shape.

As for its plumbing system, it employs an "express riser" as its main stack. Which unlike wet or standard stacks, can fill completely without the danger of sucking water out of traps on sinks and toilets because all fixtures upstream of it have their own vent at the top of another stack.

And there is no fundamental difference between a two story building and a taller one, "from a waste velocity standpoint", but your pipes must be sized properly to handle the volume of water. As would your city sewer system. Underneath your gigantic buildings would be vaults large enough to fly around in, like in The Matrix.

One means of controlling the pipe sizes and potential pressure fluctuations in very tall stacks was employed in the design of the Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower) by using intermediate building drains connected to an express riser that had no fixture connections. The beauty of this design is not only in reduced pipe sizes, but in the fact that the express riser had no fixtures connected thereto. Any pressure surges occurring in the express stack would not impact the operation of any of the building fixtures.

Increased vertical population acts to stress the demand on the piping system. It has long been known, due to the work of Dawson and Kalinske in 1939, that water traveling down a vertical drainage pipe will reach its terminal velocity in about 14 feet. So, from a waste velocity standpoint, the difference between one story and 100 stories is essentially moot. –plumbingengineer.com

The real hard part is properly sized HVAC systems. Sears' tower has several floors devoted entirely to mechanical systems (all those floors with no windows; the dark bands shown in the picture) which are largely populated by heating and air-conditioning systems.

It may also be of interest to note that Sears' tower doesn't use wire to bring electrical power up, it uses bus-bars. Which are basically isolated I-beams running the entire height of the building, supplying it with three-phase power, which then wires are attached to, per floor.

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  • $\begingroup$ You know, the Sears Tower is no longer the name of the building. $\endgroup$
    – JDługosz
    Commented Feb 18, 2017 at 4:51
  • $\begingroup$ @JDługosz it is commonly referred to as Sears, and this name is universally recognized. So what's the problem? OK, it's not an official name anymore, but it doesn't make it invalid in common speech. $\endgroup$
    – Mołot
    Commented Feb 18, 2017 at 9:14
  • $\begingroup$ Would you mind editing for those of us unfamiliar with the terms "express riser", "HVAC", "three-phase power" etc? The ideas you present are fine but the vocabulary you use is quite specific to be unlinked to other pages. $\endgroup$
    – Zxyrra
    Commented Feb 20, 2017 at 2:39
  • $\begingroup$ Whatcha talkin bout Willis? $\endgroup$
    – Mazura
    Commented Feb 22, 2017 at 1:05

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