image:reuters.com

The city’s latest high-rise homes highlight its inequality, writes Edwin Heathcote

Tom Wolfe coined the term “Social X-ray” to describe the wealthy Upper East Side wives of investment bankers, women who were impossibly thin and impossibly wealthy. The same description might fit a new generation of New York skyscrapers, the skinny towers piercing through the streets around the edges of Central Park.

They are the architectural embodiment of economic disparity, an expression of former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s desire to attract the world’s deracinated billionaires. They cast shadows on the park and silhouettes above it, and for some it is too much, too fast. But New York is a city of towers and this latest manifestation is a natural evolution of a skyline that has always adapted to economic imperative.....Continue Reading

> via ft.com