Skyscrapers. They’re the pride of any city skyline,
poking out of the horizon like glorified pins in earth’s cushion. These majestic displays
of humanity’s engineering heights have given us the iconic skylines we recognize so well today.
Huh. That’s new. And that one. Oh bleep, it’s tall as bleep. And it’s how much?
New York is seeing some of the tallest, thinnest residential buildings in the world
cropping up around Central Park, built not for the rich but for the ultra-rich.
The penthouse at 432 Park Avenue is listed for $169 million. One of the unique selling points?
They're very, very tall. Taller than you’d expect them to be allowed.
Buried somewhere in the labyrinth of New York’s zoning laws, there’s clearly something
these developers know that we all don’t.
It’s a loophole – right around here – that insiders are using to make the most
out of New York’s complicated zoning laws. And with demand for these slender towers being
higher than ever, the fight for the skyline has only just begun.
New York City has always had a unique connection to skyscrapers,
ever since elevators and steel frames made it possible to build so tall.
But when the Equitable Building was built in 1915, the sheer base width and height of the
building sparked an onslaught of criticism, with one critic at the Real Estate Magazine
describing it as a "monstrous parasite on the veins and arteries of New York".
So the city passed the 1916 Zoning Resolution, which, along with height restrictions,
required setbacks. That's how big buildings shaped like these came about,
with those big step-like forms leading to a tower.
As the city continued to build up through the century, an iconic skyline was forming.
But by 1961, the setback style tower wasn't working for everyone.
I think that the romance of the Hugh Ferris-style skyscraper
disappeared and was replaced by a different vision of urban space.
They revamped the old setback rules to a new solution called the Floor
Area Ratio(pg16), the F.A.R. Depending on the location, a new building would
be given a maximum floor area according to its ratio. Alright, let's break this down.
The city is divided into districts of varying floor area ratios from 1 to 10.
So with an F.A.R. of 10, you can build 10 times the floor area of the lot, in
whichever configuration: using the whole lot for a 10-story building, or just half for 20 stories.
Developers can transfer or buy the air rights of the lot next door
and add them to their own building area.
So if this building isn’t making use of all these air rights granted to them by the city,
they can sell to this project next door and make a decent buck instead.
In the ‘70s, former President Donald Trump bought air rights from Fifth Avenue’s landmarked Tiffany
building, bringing Trump Tower from 20 stories way up to 58. He did the same thing 20 years later,
this time with seven neighboring lots in Midtown, stacking them all into Trump World Tower.
But something’s happened in the 21st century that’s shifted skyscrapers into overdrive.
Well, two things actually.
First, developers have been combining the purchase of air rights with advanced
structural engineering – stronger steel and cement – to push buildings to new heights
while keeping the footprint small. As a result, superthin towers have
been appearing with no more warning to the neighborhood than a note on the scaffolding.
Slenderness, especially in residential buildings, comes with its advantages.
When you stack fewer apartments onto each floor, residents can enjoy
panoramic window views. It really feeds into the luxurious exclusivity of the
place. And with a smaller core where a lot of the costs go, developers save money.
Overlooking Central Park and known to everyone but the billionaires as Billionaires’ Row,
they’re some of the tallest residential buildings in the world,
including 432 Park Avenue way up at 1,400 feet.
432 was building 5 or 6 floors a week at one
point, which is amazing for a reinforced concrete building.
I’m not a novice, you know this is part of my work, and I was like “What the hell is going
on there?” I was so surprised. I was like, “That thing is gotta be toppin’ off soon.”
Designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects, the simple design was inspired, believe it or not,
by a trash can. It became the tallest residential building in the world, needing plenty of air
rights from its neighbors. But even those weren’t quite enough to reach these dizzying heights.
These floors, right here, are permanently unoccupied.
432, one of the reasons it’s so tall is because they took
the mechanical space and stuck it in there and it doesn’t count towards the FAR. So you get these,
from a zoning point of view, free lifts of space every time the mechanical floor comes through.
Around a quarter of 432 Park Avenue’s 88 floors are dedicated to structural and mechanical
equipment. You can see these voids in other supertall buildings around the city. The upcoming
Central Park Tower, reaching 95 stories tall, will have more than a fifth of its height unoccupied.
The structural engineer for both 432 Park and Central Park Tower, Silvian Marcus,
said mechanical equipment space is necessary, and without structural voids,
the towers would sway with the wind. Not an ideal feature, I’ll give him that.
But the use of these large voids has led to more extreme proposals.
432’s architects had their hopes dashed after this 32-story residential tower
on the Upper East Side was denied development because of 150 feet
of mechanical space – as if the fire department didn't climb enough staircases.
In 2019, The Department of City Planning passed a bill for residential towers
requiring mechanical floors higher than 30 feet to count towards the total zoning floor area.
But what if we’re giving mechanical floors more credit than they deserve here?
These buildings are innovative because their return on investment gets a higher floor to
floor / ceiling height, which makes the whole building taller. It’s the 3 foot
per floor that makes these buildings taller, not the mechanical floors.
The balance of regulation is a long-labored point of debate in New York City,
with all sides insisting they want to change the city for the better.
On one side, you have developers and architects looking to continue the city’s
unique and lucrative history of building tall. On another side, you have the Municipal Art Society
of New York (Mas), a non-profit organization fighting to preserve the city’s character
with thoughtful planning. They’ve published a series called Accidental Skylines, highlighting
the effects these out of scale towers could continue to have on surrounding neighborhoods.
As for news publications, they generally share a common argument against these slender towers,
aside from the fact that none of the buildings added to Billionaires’ Row has completed the
city’s safety requirements. An argument that’s impossible to ignore is the trend’s
visual exemplification of wealth inequality in the middle of an affordable housing crisis.
While making exceptions to the zoning laws continues to be a struggle for affordable
housing developers, with stacks of paperwork, it’s become the norm for luxury projects.
We very often end up making amendments to it for specific developments. Like we say “Oh we
want to build this building here so let’s amend the zoning resolution to allow this particular
building to happen. We do it all the time now. In New York City, we do it All. The. Time.
To this day, millions of square feet of available development rights cover New York.
Mas has its eye on over a hundred supertall tower proposals in the works.
I don’t know, I’m torn. To many people, those buildings represent that the city is vital,
that there’s energy, that there’s a can-do attitude, etc.
New York’s fundamental identity comes out of this idea of “as of right”, where developers can
not borrow but buy the constraint space, pile it up onto their lot, and create the opportunity
to innovate with commercial energy, the entrepreneurialism that has always been
the symbol and the reality of New York.
At the same time, those towers put an enormous
amount of pressure on urban infrastructure. We have yet to see what happens if there’s a
fire in a supertall, for example. Especially with these voids.
One thing is for sure. Our capacity to build things
has outstripped our ability to fully understand the consequences.