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Too Rich, Too Thin, Too Tall?

United Kingdom Architecture News - Apr 10, 2014 - 15:18   2502 views

Ever taller, ever thinner, the new condo towers racing skyward in Midtown Manhattan are breaking records for everything, including price. Sold for $95 million, the 96th floor of 432 Park Avenue will be the highest residence in the Western world. As shadows creep across Central Park, Paul Goldberger looks at the construction, architecture, and marketing of these super-luxury aeries, gauging their effect on the city’s future.

Too Rich, Too Thin, Too Tall?

PILLAR OF SOCIETY An aerial view of One57 and the shadow it casts over Central Park, dwarfing those of its neighbors.

These days, it is not just a woman who can never be too rich or too thin. You can say almost exactly the same thing about skyscrapers, or at least about the latest residential ones now going up in New York City, which are much taller, much thinner, and much, much more expensive than their predecessors. And almost every one of them seems built to be taller, thinner, and pricier than the one that came before. Few people are inclined to mourn the end of the age of the luxury apartment building as a boxy slab. But what is replacing it, which you might call the latest way of housing the rich, is an entirely new kind of tower, pencil-thin and super-tall—so tall, in fact, that one of the new buildings now rising in Manhattan, the 96-story concrete tower at the corner of 56th Street and Park Avenue, 432 Park Avenue, will be 150 feet higher than the Empire State Building when it is finished, and taller than the highest occupied floor of the new 1 World Trade Center. And construction on an even taller super-luxury building, 225 West 57th Street, is scheduled to begin next year, so 432 Park’s reign as the city’s tallest residence and second-tallest skyscraper will be short-lived.

These buildings are transforming the streetscape of Midtown and Lower Manhattan, and they are transforming the skyline even more. Two new luxury apartment towers in the super-tall category are going up in Tribeca, at least so far. But the biggest impact has been in Midtown, in the blocks between 53rd and 60th Streets, where seven of the new condominiums are either under construction or planned. Four of them are on 57th Street alone, which day by day is becoming less of a boulevard defined by elegant shopping and more like a canyon lined by high walls. (And that’s just the buildings that have been announced. There are others rumored to be in the planning stages, including one that would replace the venerable Rizzoli bookstore, also on West 57th Street.)

 

Shadowlands

If there is any saving grace to this tsunami of towers, it is in their very slenderness. From a distance they read as needles more than as boxes; what they take away from the street they give back to a skyline that has been robbed of much of its classic romantic form by the bulky, flat-topped office towers that have filled so much of Midtown and Lower Manhattan. These new buildings will not exactly turn Manhattan into a sleek glass version of San Gimignano—“the city of beautiful towers”—but thin buildings at least make for a striking skyline, and they cast thinner shadows as well.
Too Rich, Too Thin, Too Tall?
BY JOE LERTOLA/BRYAN CHRISTIE DESIGN.

Those shadows are no casual matter, since all of the new buildings are relatively close to Central Park, and they are arranged in an arc that extends from the southeast to the southwest corner of the park, not so different from the arc of the daily path of the sun. The impact will vary from season to season, but there is little doubt that the southern portion of the park will be in more shadow than it is today. Given the slenderness of the new towers, it might be more accurate to say that the southern end of the park is someday going to look striped.

The even more troubling shadow these buildings cast, however, is a social and economic one. If you seek a symbol of income inequality, look no farther than 57th Street. These new buildings are so expensive, even by New York standards, because they are built mainly for the global super-rich, people who live in the Middle East or China or Latin America and travel between London and Shanghai and São Paulo and Moscow as if they were going from Brooklyn to Manhattan. There have always been some people like that, at least since the dawn of the jet age, but it’s only in the last decade that developers have put up buildings specifically with these buyers in mind. The Time Warner Center, at Columbus Circle, finished in 2004, was New York’s trial run, so to speak, at targeting this new market for condominiums with spectacular views at exceptionally high prices. But it’s a global phenomenon, with buildings such as One Hyde Park, in London, and the Cullinan and the Opus, in Hong Kong. The new 57th Street may be New York’s way of playing with the big boys as far as global cities are concerned, but it comes at the price of making Midtown feel ever more like Shanghai or Hong Kong: a place not for its full-time residents but for the top 1 percent of the 1 percent to touch down in when the mood strikes.

And yet, in other ways, these buildings are absolutely characteristic of New York, which has a long and honorable tradition of skinny towers: the Flatiron Building (completed in 1902), the now demolished Singer Building (1908), the Metropolitan Life tower (1909), and the Woolworth Building (1913). In those days, skyscrapers couldn’t be too bulky, because you couldn’t be that far from a window. Then fluorescent lighting, air-conditioning, sealed windows, and a preference for big, horizontal office floors took over...Continue Reading

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