The streets of New York…
It’s been nearly a century since New York’s skyscraper boom saw it transform into an iconic,
world class city and still after all this time, things in the big apple are looking peachy.
Old New York, new New York, honey a least it’s New York
Wall Street remains the unrivalled centre of global finance, there’s an insatiable
demand for office space, housing is high quality and affordable, the subway is a
world leader in reliability and the city air smells of roses and freshly cut grass.
But that’s a lie
Back in the real world, New York is starting to lose its edge as
the world’s financial centre. Changes in post-covid working patterns, competition
from other hubs and crippling apartment rents are creating a nightmare for the City of Dreams.
So, NYC is fighting back the only way it knows how,
by building big.
This supertall giant is what you get when New York tries to build our planet’s best skyscraper.
But will it be enough to help the capital of the world keep its crown?
Here at The B1M there’s only one thing we love more than construction, a classic underdog story,
so here goes: New York. It’s North America’s biggest city by population, a cultural
powerhouse and it’s been the centre of the global financial system for most of the last century.
I’m walkin’ here!
To help keep things that way, is 270 Park Avenue, the new USD $3BN headquarters of
banking giant JPMorgan Chase. Designed by superstar architects Foster + Partners,
at 423-metres high, it takes up an entire block on one of the most exclusive streets in Manhattan.
See, doesn’t it make your heart melt? Ok again, maybe not, but a building
like this takes some serious engineering and that’s something we can all enjoy.
So you’ve got a design for a cutting edge new skyscraper that will be the envy of the world,
but this being New York, to build anything new first you have to knock something else down.
Back in 2019 Manhattan said goodbye to the previous incumbent of 270 Park Avenue:
the Union Carbide Building.
That was no simple job. At 216-metres,
it was the tallest building to ever be voluntarily demolished.
Three floors were stripped out and reinforced to allow the building to
be split up into four sections. Over the course of two years,
each section was wrapped in a protective mesh and dismantled piece-by-piece.
Now, although it was loved by architecture critics,
the Union Carbide Building was kind of emblematic of New York’s decline.
Post-pandemic, cities around the world have struggled.
In February, commercial occupancy in the city was still roughly half of what it was before COVID.
But while the mid-range buildings lay empty,
there’s still high demand for super premium, modern office space – and
that’s where New York is starting to lose out. It just doesn’t have very much of it.
Back in the late 2010s urban planners were worried about New York’s ageing stock of skyscrapers. That
led to the rezoning of midtown east in 2017 – basically a re-writing of the planning laws – in
an attempt to incentivise the construction of new, world-class office skyscrapers.
To make matters worse, the recent tall building
boom in Miami is threatening to knock New York off its top spot.
Flashy new financial districts may be par for the course for
any aspiring world city from Egypt to Malaysia, but Miami is a bit different.
It’s in the same time zone as New York, has broadly the same US regulations but…
better weather. It’s even earned the title the Wall Street of the South.
Some speculate it could one day overtake NYC as the US’
top financial centre – provided it doesn’t disappear underwater first.
Now, I know, I know, this may not be the cosy underdog story we all needed, but it does explain
why there’s a lot of expectation on building’s like 270 Park Avenue to keep New York competitive.
But before we go any further: to design any kind of skyscraper you need a pretty serious
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Now back to New York.
Once demolition completed in 2021, construction could begin on the new tower. But it wasn’t
just what was sitting above ground that caused problems for engineers.
Running directly under the construction site are train tracks leading into Grand
Central station and below that, the MTA’s USD $11BN East Side Access megaproject,
extending the Long Island Railroad deep into Manhattan.
The new tower will be almost twice the height of the old one, meaning more extensive foundations.
For a building this size the standard approach would be to drill deep down to
high quality rock, or create shallower but wider deep pile foundations.
But with two subway lines stacked just beneath the ground floor this just wasn’t an option.
Now for the tower to get planning permission in the first place, it had to create a new, public
plaza at street level – and Foster + Partners saw this as a way to kill two birds with one stone.
Because of the subway, engineers were forced to use many of the same footings as the original
building’s foundations which consisted of shear walls running alongside the subway.
To take the enormous weight of the building,
these shear walls were reinforced with pile foundations underneath.
The ground floor of the building was raised up onto a tabletop structure
which created the public area at ground level.
This was propped up by a series of dramatic V-shaped columns directing
the immense weight of the skyscraper down onto those carefully placed foundations underneath.
With the extremely complex foundations complete and work on those V-shaped columns began.
They’ll run up the whole side of the building, creating the tower’s visually striking look.
Now, as we said this is New York’s comeback skyscraper,
so naturally its design is something of a greatest hits
oh!
but not like that…
The tower's setbacks and vertical lines
echo the art deco forms of New York’s early 1920s skyscrapers.
But while the skyscraper’s design may reference Manhattan’s heritage,
its height and size is a clear nod to the ruthless nature of New York
real estate – 270 Park will easily eclipse the towers it pays homage to.
To reach its extraordinary height JPMorgan Chase bought an astonishing 700,000
square feet of air rights from the nearby Grand Central station and stacked them onto its site.
With air space agreed, the tower’s steel frame began to rapidly rise. At each level,
steel floor sheets are being laid across the beams
before concrete is poured on top of them, forming the floor slabs.
The tower’s elevator and service cores are then rising up through the frame and
that whole process will continue right up to the top of the tower,
with the building’s external cladding and then internal fitout following close behind.
But hold on a minute – the core rising through the frame is unusual. Most
skyscrapers will build their concrete cores first using a jump-form system with the wider
steel or concrete frame superstructure following behind. Though it doesn’t happen on every tower,
New York is the one place where this is sometimes done differently. It all goes
back to the steel worker’s unions preferring their own space without other trades in the way.
When the tower completes, it'll rank as New York’s sixth tallest skyscraper but the tallest
powered purely by electricity, supplied by a hydroelectric power station in upstate New York.
That’s just one of many signs that this tower is pushing the evolution of the skyscraper. Special
filtering systems increase natural airflow from outside, reducing the use of air conditioning.
The architect also claim that the building reduces the use
of electricity by “circadian lighting design” – that’s the sun, to you and me.
But it’s not just technology that makes this building different. Remember all
those workers reluctant to return to the office? Well, the tower's owner is all
too aware of the creature comforts people have got used to at home.
To pamper the financiers who’ll work in the building, “wellness” is central to
its design. Even new age guru Deepak Chopra is credited as a consultant on the project.
That’s it, G U R U. The only guru is your own self.
The building will include gyms, multifaith prayer rooms, medical services and more.
So there you have it, an ultra-modern skyscraper to help put a city back on the map.
Although, before we get ahead of ourselves,
it’s important to remember that this is owned by the world’s richest bank.
New York is one of the most complicated and expensive cities in the world to build in
and creating towers like this is financially impossible for the majority of businesses,
most developers and even some billionaires.
Will the rise of super premium office space help New York get its mojo back or will this
be just another deserted tower in a city in decline? Well, that all remains to be seen.
What’s certain is that New York has never been a place for the faint
hearted and there are few things more iconic here than a sky high megabuild.
This video was made possible by Brilliant, you can learn more about that at the link below.
There’s also the chance to dive deeper on 270 Park Avenue and the other topics on our
channel over on The World’s Best Construction Podcast – available right now wherever you get
your podcasts. And as always , if you enjoyed this video and you want to get more from the
definitive video channel for construction, make sure you’re subscribed to The B1M.