| NYguy |
Feb 5, 2019 1:15 PM |
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...rks-super-rich
Super-tall, super-skinny, super-expensive: the 'pencil towers' of New York's super-rich
By Oliver Wainwright
Feb 5, 2019
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.....The newly restored white limestone facade of the 1920s Steinway Hall, where Sergei Rachmaninoff, Nina Simone and Marvin Gaye all played, now cowers at the foot of one of the most audacious structures ever conceived.
The former piano showroom and recital hall will soon serve as the luxury health club for residents of 111 West 57th Street, a 435-metre tall, 18-metre wide wafer of a building. With a slenderness ratio of 1:24, it is set to be the skinniest skyscraper in the world. Try making that stand up in gale-force winds.
“The 800-tonne tuned mass damper helps,” says Chris Sharples of SHoP Architects, the firm responsible for the design, referring to the gigantic weight at the top of the tower that will help to stabilise the building. Making this gossamer-thin strip of a tower stand up has some strange consequences inside. In order to leave the north and south facades open for uninterrupted views, the two bracing concrete side walls are up to a metre thick, creating deep arrow-slit windows – perhaps an appropriate aesthetic for these fortified luxury bunkers in the sky.
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Right out of one of Hugh Ferriss’s drawings, the tower’s tapering silhouette is a literal expression of the required set-back angle along 57th Street. (The developers even hung a Ferriss-inspired image of the building over the scaffolding, perhaps the first time a planning diagram has been used as a marketing tool.) But rather than stepping the building back in big chunks, the architects have reduced the mass in slender increments, giving it the feathered look of a quill pen. They have taken inspiration from New York’s cherished skyscrapers of the early 20th century, such as the Woolworth and Chrysler buildings, cladding the concrete side walls with panels of moulded terracotta and bronze, which form shimmering waves when seen from the street below. It is one of the few hyper-luxury apartment buildings that actually has the ethereal aura you would expect – a fitting costume for the eyrie of an untouchable elite.
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“We were thinking the very top would make a cool aviary,” adds Sharples, “but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.” There may be no aviary, but there is practically everything else.
To stand in the show apartment across the road is to be transported to another realm. A miniature bronze model of the tower serves as the apartment’s front door handle, which turns with an expensive clunk to reveal a lair of untold opulence. It is a place where the walls of his-and-hers dressing rooms are covered with leather and velvet, where sinks are carved from solid blocks of Italian onyx, where walnut drawers are lined with ostrich skin.
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“We’ve used the most expensive and hard-to-find stone in the world,” says Michael Stern, founder of JDS Development Group, as he pats one of the solid marble kitchen counters. A thick-set 39-year-old with a soft Long Island accent, Stern makes for a disarming luxury real-estate tycoon. He is a passionate enthusiast for the city’s architectural history, and seems genuinely eager to add to the canon. He extolls his tower as a monument of world firsts, from the acres of rare book-matched stone and timber to “the most complicated facade ever attempted”. Leading me around the palatial apartment, he points out how the shower doorframe is made of solid bronze, how the kitchen cupboards are single pieces of curved glass, how the spiral staircase has solid stone treads. At least the weight of all the marble should be enough to keep the tower from tipping over.
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So what does Stern make of the criticisms that these silos of billionaires are casting ever-longer shadows across Central Park, and that the negotiations happen well away from public scrutiny?
“The shadow argument has been debunked completely,” he insists. “Shorter, blockier buildings cast bigger, long-lasting shadows than tall slender buildings, which have longer shadows that move more quickly. If all of the air rights were built out in slender towers, rather than blocky buildings, the shadow impact would be much less. The density is finite, so isn’t it better that it’s used in a taller, slender building, rather than a short, fatter one?”
As for the lack of public review, he is adamant that it is the foundation of the city’s success. “One of the great things about New York, compared to other cities, is that, as a developer, you can rely on as-of-right zoning: there is a certainty about your building rights. What makes the economy go is the fact there isn’t a discretionary review of everything.” When I raise the opacity of air rights transfers, and the problem that no neighbour knows who is selling, or if they will see a 30- or 90-storey tower as a result of their sale, he grins: “That’s part of the game of assemblage.”
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This love of Manhattan’s no-holds-barred market logic is shared by Carol Willis, director of the city’s Skyscraper Museum, which staged an exhibition on the super-slender towers when they first began to appear in 2013. When asked in an interview if there should be any change to planning policy in response to the rash of super-talls, her response was immediate: “No, absolutely not.”
She says campaigners fail to understand that these towers “will not add one single square foot of built density to the city”, given that allowable density is finite. “It’s a cap-and-trade system,” she says, so once air rights are transferred from a low-rise lot, it will stay low for ever. The rules merely allow potential floor area to be shifted, not created.
As for the accusation that the buildings will remain empty, sold to a class of people who won’t live in them anyway, she makes an interesting comparison with London, where swaths of Kensington and Chelsea stand eerily quiet for much of the year, having been flogged off to overseas investors.
“Concentrating more people, even if they’re billionaires, in towers to keep neighbourhoods tight and active is a much smarter way to add space to the city,” she says, “rather than to displace people on the ground plane and move them further out … The problem of people having more money should be addressed by taxes and public policy, not by restricting purchases on multi-million dollar apartments.”
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