Quote:
Originally Posted by hughfb3
This tower for some reason brings up the question for me… when is 1000 ft no long Super Tall and becomes just tall? There are so many 1000 footers in NYC and the skyline is looking flat lately. Love that this building is going up though
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Cities (or rather parts of cities) tend towards various height plateaux at any given time. The reasons for this are pretty cool actually.. in a given area in a real market (i.e. not dubai and not china lol), the demand for square footage vs the costs of building taller buildings always reach an equilibrium, which determines ideal building height for that area. This equilibrium point is the center of a bell curve; at any given time, the vast majority of new square footage in the given area will be in buildings with heights less than a standard deviation from the equilibrium height. But the center of this equilibrium curve doesnt increase steadily, instead it increases in quantized jumps –like electron orbitals– because theres no reason to build significantly above the equilibrium height until all the buildable land in the given desireable area has filled up its present equilibrium (orbital shell).
From roughly 1960 to the present, midtown manhattan has been filling up its 200 meter plateau. Basically all of new york's supertalls thus far have been
deliberate outliers, on the high end of the bell curve; from their inception they were built to be landmarks, with the hope that an above-equilibrium-height building would fetch above-equilibrium prices from a relatively small number of very wealthy businesses (and ever since One57, residents).
But this building and 1 manhattan west, among others, are signs that the equilibrium point in midtown is now in the middle of a jump, from 200m to 300m. The prestige of having landmark status office space is no longer the main selling point for 300m buildings. The presigious office buildings of the next few decades will be in the 400-500 meter range, such as Vandy and the new Grand Hyatt.