What is the usage for fantasy tall buildings / skyscrapers?

I currently have a standard fantasy setting world in my hand, and I would like to have my character to be the master of a fantasy tall building (it looks cool). However, a starscraper without a function looks plain and odd, so I thought of making it a prison. But then, it looks weird in some sense:

• Usage: Prison for holding criminals who have committed very serious crimes that cannot be undone in any way, so their punishment is life long imprisonment in the starscraper and suffer a living hell every day.

I hope someone can further elaborate on this idea or give this skyscraper a better usage (anything is possible)

Skyscrapers can be used for religious purposes. Make people closer to God and all that.

They could be watchtowers, lighthouses, signal beacons... not to mention being imposing and impressive monuments to the greatness of whoever built them or lives in them.

edited 10th Jul '17 8:36:02 AM by pwiegle

If you're going for an almost-literal Star Scraper, then a traditional lighthouse/beacon design isn't going to be very practical if used for those purposes. Perhaps if it had lights interspersed every few dozens stories or so.

In a traditional fantasy setting, really tall towers usually serve as either the entranceway to the realm of the gods, or a grueling multi-floor dungeon, where you have to fight your way through each progressively harder floor to get to whatever prize is at the top. If you've ever read the webtoon Tower of God, the tower the characters all reside in is kind of a combination of both, as well as pretty much encompassing all of known existence.

Why not just housing?

Housing would've been the main reason why a real life medieval (or earlier) city might have wanted to build a skyscraper-sized building, since without refrigeration and canning, most of the food for a city had to be produced locally, but housing for the population ate up a lot of the available farming space, sometimes even all of it if the city filled up the entirety of a fertile river delta or valley^note Which is actually a big reason why early urbanised civilisation went from just Cities to City-states: With housing for the population eating up so much of the local arable land, the cities had to extend their influence over nearby towns with smaller populations, and therefore more available farm land, and convince them to pay the city tribute in the form of food in order to feed the city's population..

Lots of others have listed good suggestions. Like living space, access to cooler temps at higher altitude for food storage, but something else the medieval world relied on heavily for powering early machines. Wind power. It gets a bit easier to harness wind power the higher up you go and having and abundant and fairly constant access could provide the means to power any number of possible wooden mechanical devices.

That and as a fortification in and of itself. Aside from the vertical dungeon aspect it would be a serious pain in the ass to siege such a tower with mostly fantasy material even with the help of magic.

The tower being massively tall could in theory house all of the suggestions and then some.

edited 11th Jul '17 3:21:39 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Thanks everyone. After reading through the suggestions, I thought that the skyscraper should serve as a link between different worlds, like that of an elevator. My character will be like the guard over the gate to the two worlds.

BUT THEN, since it serves as a link to two worlds and holds a very important value, making it into a housing seems impossible.

Yet I'd like to have something to fill up the bottom 99 floors of the tower, something that would be either fearsome or some defense mechanism that could guard the tower in case some intruders invade the tower.

The reason is stairs. If you're using it for housing it means the poor schmucks living on the top floors have to go down the entire height when they want to leave and then climb them again to get back to their dwellings.

Overpopulation wasn't a thing in medieval time.

There were limits to how tall they could be built, too. Back in the late 19th and early 20th century, banks and other institutions had their buildings made from huge granite blocks, to give the public an impression of permanence and impregnability. But such buildings could only be five or six stories tall at most, due to the inherent limitations of their design. Skyscrapers were only possible after new high-tensile-strength steel alloys were developed, and became cheap enough to build with on a large scale. Also, reinforced concrete was a lot easier to build with than car-sized granite blocks.

But in a fantasy setting, you're not bound by the normal laws of physics. An impossibly tall building could be supported by magic.

edited 11th Jul '17 9:29:21 AM by pwiegle

Overpopulation was generally kept in check by diseases. If that stops being an issue you could totally have overpopulation issues in cities.

Also, overpopulation totally was a thing in medieval times. Before our modern advances in agriculture, canal building and plumbing, basically the only place you could build a permanent settlement (or a farm, for that matter) was near a lake or river. The population may have been smaller at the time, but so was the available living space.

(In fact, those diseases Belisaurius mentioned? Their spread was the result of overpopulation.)

If the topmost floor houses a gate to another world, then maybe other floors could serve as some sort of wizard college where sorcerers learn and study magic with the help of this gate? A mega Mage Tower or sorts.

Additionally different levels, if not the entire building may be a better focus ("closer to the Force") for magic-users that doubles as a ranking system where being at the bottom either means there's less ambient magic so it's less of a safety hazard (if magic's as volatile as pure oxygen/nitro) so advancing means you're more competent/responsible with higher qualities or there's more ambient magic at the bottom that's easier to use, so going upwards is like going up Everest so the best wizards can thrive in the thinnest/least amount of atmosphere as easily as a novice at the bottom.

Usually skyscrapers in real life are office\workplace buildings. But in a more fantasy setting where people's jobs tend to be using your respective powers to team up and travel to fight monsters and save the world (people without powers are stuck being village builders, merchants, innkeepers, and\or farmers) skyscrapers tend to be symbolic buildings, as all the basics are covered by simple huts, small Tudor-style homes, fairy cottages, and Medieval castles. That's it. There's some Greek temples and lost [[Mayincatec]] ruins, but most of it is basically generic Medieval European buildings.

So, let's make each floor of the skyscraper, have a portal to a different world (be it fantasy, sci-fi, realistic, silly, sci-fantasy, steampunk, or w\ever). People fight and train in this skyscraper when they pass by the town that has the skyscraper. Depending on what world is reached by the portal, different types of powers are faster to learn as well as stronger. The floors are also used by magical teenage priestesses, one each per floor. Those teenage priestesses are there to worship the portal and the universe reached by it, and be leaders of religions worshipping their respective portal and universe.