Too Rich, Too Thin, Too Tall?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Until now, that is. Today, there is more money to be made from housing people in the sky than ever before in New York City. In part, this is because a building full of apartments requires far fewer elevators than an office building with its armies of workers. Add to that the facts that people are willing to pay dearly for views, particularly of Central Park, and that they will pay an even greater premium for an apartment that occupies an entire floor—well, if you pile a lot of full-floor or half-floor apartments on top of one another and try to give all of them a park view, you pretty much end up with a very thin, very tall tower within a couple of blocks of Central Park.
“The super-tall, super-slender towers are a new form of skyscraper,” Carol Willis, the founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum, in Lower Manhattan, told me. At 432 Park Avenue, which was designed by the architect Rafael Viñoly for the developers Harry Macklowe and the CIM Group, each of the 104 apartments will occupy either a full floor or a half-floor, and the loftiest of them, a full-floor unit on the 96th floor, will be the highest residence in the Western Hemisphere, at least until the building at 225 West 57th Street goes ahead. Viñoly’s penthouse has already sold for $95 million to an unidentified buyer, which is close to $11,500 a square foot; the average asking price in the building was close to $7,000 a square foot, almost three times the average for Manhattan luxury condominiums last year. In exchange for parting with this kind of cash, the residents at 432 Park will be able to look down on the Chrysler Building and just about everything else in Midtown, including their neighbors at One57, the 90-story blue glass tower at 157 West 57th Street, which will be completed later this year (although a number of units are already occupied).
One57 was the first of this new generation of super-tall, super-thin, super-expensive buildings, and it is astonishing to think that its height of 1,004 feet, just 42 feet shorter than the Chrysler Building, will make it the tallest residential building in the city for a few months only, until 432 Park is finished, probably next year.
One57 attracted a lot of attention for the sale of one of its two largest apartments for the then unheard-of price of more than $90 million (to an investor group headed by the financier Bill Ackman)—and a lot more attention for the fact that its crane assembly broke loose and dangled ominously over the street during Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, requiring the evacuation of seven square blocks around the building. Its developer, Gary Barnett, of Extell, spent about 10 years assembling the site, and in 2005 asked the French architect Christian de Portzamparc to come up with a design.
Even before the new wave of super-tall buildings, the condominium market in New York had become much more design-sensitive, and putting the names of well-known architects like Richard Meier, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, or Robert A. M. Stern on buildings has become a marketing advantage. In fact, at these prices it’s now gotten to be something of a necessity, the same way some women will only spend $3,000 or $4,000 on a dress if it has a famous designer’s name on it.
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.
Until now, that is. Today, there is more money to be made from housing people in the sky than ever before in New York City. In part, this is because a building full of apartments requires far fewer elevators than an office building with its armies of workers. Add to that the facts that people are willing to pay dearly for views, particularly of Central Park, and that they will pay an even greater premium for an apartment that occupies an entire floor—well, if you pile a lot of full-floor or half-floor apartments on top of one another and try to give all of them a park view, you pretty much end up with a very thin, very tall tower within a couple of blocks of Central Park.
“The super-tall, super-slender towers are a new form of skyscraper,” Carol Willis, the founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum, in Lower Manhattan, told me. At 432 Park Avenue, which was designed by the architect Rafael Viñoly for the developers Harry Macklowe and the CIM Group, each of the 104 apartments will occupy either a full floor or a half-floor, and the loftiest of them, a full-floor unit on the 96th floor, will be the highest residence in the Western Hemisphere, at least until the building at 225 West 57th Street goes ahead. Viñoly’s penthouse has already sold for $95 million to an unidentified buyer, which is close to $11,500 a square foot; the average asking price in the building was close to $7,000 a square foot, almost three times the average for Manhattan luxury condominiums last year. In exchange for parting with this kind of cash, the residents at 432 Park will be able to look down on the Chrysler Building and just about everything else in Midtown, including their neighbors at One57, the 90-story blue glass tower at 157 West 57th Street, which will be completed later this year (although a number of units are already occupied).
One57 was the first of this new generation of super-tall, super-thin, super-expensive buildings, and it is astonishing to think that its height of 1,004 feet, just 42 feet shorter than the Chrysler Building, will make it the tallest residential building in the city for a few months only, until 432 Park is finished, probably next year.
One57 attracted a lot of attention for the sale of one of its two largest apartments for the then unheard-of price of more than $90 million (to an investor group headed by the financier Bill Ackman)—and a lot more attention for the fact that its crane assembly broke loose and dangled ominously over the street during Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, requiring the evacuation of seven square blocks around the building. Its developer, Gary Barnett, of Extell, spent about 10 years assembling the site, and in 2005 asked the French architect Christian de Portzamparc to come up with a design.
Even before the new wave of super-tall buildings, the condominium market in New York had become much more design-sensitive, and putting the names of well-known architects like Richard Meier, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, or Robert A. M. Stern on buildings has become a marketing advantage. In fact, at these prices it’s now gotten to be something of a necessity, the same way some women will only spend $3,000 or $4,000 on a dress if it has a famous designer’s name on it.