An island city full of money and ego that has no choice but to go up. and up. and up. Imagine the Manhattan skyline in slow motion, starting around 1890—when the New York Peace Tower towered over the 284-foot spire of Trinity Church—and culminating today: it’s an ongoing series of heavenly accomplishments, each new proud duel eclipsing the last.
Perhaps much of this history was driven by fierce competition—for example, the fierce battle for the title of tallest building in the world between the Chrysler Building and the Manhattan Bank Trust Building (40 Wall Street), which Chrysler won by a surprising margin. . margin Beat in battle: A secretly built spire was added at the last minute, pushing New York’s height record to 1,046 feet in the precious 11 months before the Empire State Building reached the top. But the architectural history of the city cannot be reduced to game mechanics. Other things are happening. Manhattan was built because it couldn’t grow and couldn’t sit still. Those residents who are able to do this will strive to climb the hill.
We now live in a different era of climbing. There are 21 buildings in the city with roof heights over 800 feet, seven of which were built in the last 15 years (and three of which were built in the last 36 months). In this New York special, we explore a high-altitude archipelago perched on top of 21 megastructures. Its total area is about 34 million square feet and includes luxurious living spaces, a dazzling work environment (during and after construction), high-end hangouts. Visually, the experience of this new height differs from previous experiences where arrows were raised to 400, 500, or 600 feet. At an altitude of 800 meters and above, there is something unusual in a city with smelly sidewalks and crowded streets that wait, sluggishly move and rush – a sort of alpine retreat. Every New Yorker knows what delightful seclusion can be found among the anonymous crowds on the streets. It’s something else: the harsh sense of isolation caused by reaching a point of view that doesn’t seem to suit the human eye.
Ten years from now, the ideas presented in the following pages may seem outlandish and even incomplete. But today they offer rare glimpses of the city’s rare new neighborhoods in the sky. Jack Silverstein ♦
Alicia Mattson, who works atop World Trade Center 1, compares the experience at over 800 feet to “being in a giant snowball. Everything is calm.” Ferry on the river Son. “You focus on things like boat traffic,” she said. “You don’t feel like you’re actually in the city.” At this height, the noise of city life disappears along with close-up details. The perspective is blurred. Cars and pedestrians on the street seem to be crawling.
“Would you really regret it if one of the dots stopped moving forever?” asks Harry Lime on the Ferris wheel in The Third Man.
Jimmy Park’s office is also on the 85th floor, and in his spare time he likes to climb mountains, in other words, “You look down on what isn’t there and you feel like you have a long way to go.” go from where you need to if you need security. Seeing from a distance is also somewhat therapeutic. It happens on the plane, in the mountains, on the beach. I’ll be meeting with a new client and we’ll be looking out the window and enjoying this soothing silence.
“It’s akin,” he continues, “to the “view effect” that astronauts feel and that has ignited the entire environmental movement. You realize how small you are and how big the world is.”
The Old Testament proclaims that every valley must be raised and every hill must be lowered, in accordance with classical notions of proportion and balance. By the 18th century, the awe, fear, and ecstasy previously reserved for God had turned into geological phenomena such as mountains and the experience of conquering peaks. Kant called it “terribly sublime.” In the 19th century, with the development of new technologies and cities, the natural was opposed to the man-made. The sublime becomes accessible by climbing to the top of tall buildings.
In this spirit, Richard Morris Hunt designed the New York Tribune Building, completed in 1875, with a 260-foot bell tower that rivaled the spire of Trinity Church as the tallest building in the city. A quarter of a century later, Daniel Burnham’s 285-foot Flatiron Building set a new ideal for the tall and thin, soon rivaling the 700-foot MetLife Tower opposite Madison Square Park. next to the Woolworth Building Cass Gilbert, 1913, 792 ft.
Less than 20 years later, the New York skyline found its Platonic ideal in the Chrysler and the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building’s 204-foot mooring mast, which has never docked, is the commercial equivalent of Trinity College’s spire. As E. B. White writes, city skylines are “to the country what white church spiers are to the countryside—visible symbols of aspiration and faith, white feathers pointing the way upward.”
The hilly New York skyline has become an icon of the city, a postcard image of the American Age and a classic movie image, its silhouette reflecting what was happening below. White’s idea is based on vibrant street life, the way towers meet pavement and curb. Ambitious cities in recent decades have built taller buildings than New York City but never completely replaced Manhattan, in part because skylines are the backdrop of urbanization, if not drawn from actual, bustling neighborhoods.
Half a century ago, in Manhattan, status was determined by neighborhood exclusivity, not just height: a 20th-floor penthouse on Park Avenue still symbolizes the pinnacle of the social pyramid. At that time, truly dizzying heights like 800 feet were mostly commercial buildings, not residential buildings. Skyscrapers advertise companies. With such a height, the high construction costs cannot be covered by apartments alone.
This has only changed in the last decade or so, when apartments in luxury buildings like 15 Central Park West once cost $3,000 or more per square foot. Suddenly, a very tall, very thin 57th Street project with a floor slab large enough for an apartment or two and requiring far fewer elevators to take up space than a commercial building will be a problem for aggressive developers. profitable. Famous architects were involved. As Carol Willis, founding director of the Skyscraper Museum in Lower Manhattan, likes to say, form follows finance.
Height suddenly replaced the neighborhood as a status symbol, partly because zoning regulations directed skyscrapers to the city’s less restrictive multi-use areas such as 57th Street, which also offered money-making opportunities for Central Park, partly because it was aimed at South Asia. copper industrialists and Russian oligarchs have little incentive to live in their apartments. They don’t need neighbors anyway. They want opinions. Developers advertise the buildings as de facto country estates, where the chances of meeting someone who isn’t an employee of the building are negligible, and their own restaurant is occupants-only, so even eating out isn’t required. actually comes out.
Many New Yorkers, dissatisfied with the tax breaks given to the mighty and mighty of these skyscrapers, imagined themselves working in the long, haggard shadows cast by the new towers. But shadows aside, that’s not entirely true of ultra-tall buildings. Some may not like their size, but a few apartments in mostly non-residential areas near Midtown or Wall Street are not the cause of gentrification and displacement. There can be a little bit of xenophobia in the anti-top phenomenon. To be sure, there are many wealthy Chinese, Indians and Arabs who, like their Jewish predecessors, prefer to look down on Upper East Side cooperative boards when faced with an impossible verification process.
Regardless, 57th Street is now known as Billionaire Street and wealth has reached new heights. Advances in skyscraper technology have a lot to do with this. William F. Baker, who helped design Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest tower at 2,717 feet, recently explained the engineering behind life at over 800 feet. Engineers, who have long figured out how to keep skyscrapers from collapsing, are increasingly focusing on a more difficult problem: making the people inside feel safe, he says. This is a difficult task because very tall and very thin buildings are designed to bend rather than break like airplane wings. Ordinary people worry about activities in tall buildings long before anything threatens their safety. The slight push you take for granted in a car or train can cause panic 100 floors up, though you’re still safer in a building than in a car.
Incredible efforts are currently being made to mitigate these effects. Today’s ultra-thin towers are equipped with sophisticated counterweights, dampers and other motion devices, as well as elevators that lift occupants into the air, but not so fast that you feel any disturbing g-force. A speed of about 30 feet per second seems like the ideal speed, suggesting that luxurious towers can be pushed to the limit—not because we can’t design buildings a mile high, but because wealthy tenants won’t tolerate the fact that it takes minutes. to the building Inbound elevators drive up to apartments where the annual expenses of the Republic of Palau are paid.
Special engineering requirements are said to account for a significant portion of the cost of ultra-tall condominiums such as 432 Park Avenue, currently the tallest condominium building in Midtown Manhattan and one of the most expensive. Its exterior is a mesh of concrete and glass, like an extruded Sol LeWitt or an expansive vase by Josef Hoffmann (or a raised middle finger, depending on your point of view). Giant double shutters near the roof, the size of a locomotive engine – and boasting spectacular double-height views of the city – act as shock absorbers, providing ballast and preventing chandeliers from ringing and champagne glasses toppling over.
If the Petronas Towers and the Empire State Building were once Manhattan’s north-south border, the poles of the city’s skyline, compass points now include 1 World Trade, 432 Park, and One57 a few blocks to the west. The latter, with its awkward curves and tinted windows, leads from midtown Manhattan to Las Vegas or Shanghai. About a mile away, a huge chalkboard building called Hudson Yards threatens to become a mini-Singapore of the West End.
But the taste is hard to legitimize. When the Chrysler Building was completed, it was greeted with horror by critics and then hailed as a blueprint for skyscrapers, as modern glass and steel towers reshaped the post-war skyline and sparked renewed outrage. Looking back, we can see that 1950s landmarks like Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House at SOM and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building were as beautiful and ornate as anything else in the United States, though in the following decades they changed. spawned millions of mediocre architectural imitations that litter Manhattan and obscure the genius of the original. It was the era of white exodus and suburban sprawl, when Roland Barthes described New York as a vertical metropolis, “people absent from accumulation,” and America’s so-called park towers, often unfairly maligned conglomerates. poor quarters, many on the outskirts of the city, were abandoned. The city’s ugliest skyscraper at 375 Pearl Street, long known as the Verizon Tower, is a windowless monster that still towers over the Brooklyn Bridge. It was built by Minoru Yamasaki in 1976, right after the Twin Towers, and New Yorkers either loved or hated them – until many saw them differently, and not just because of what happened. 11 September. At dawn and dusk, the corners of the sculpted towers absorb sunlight, making orange and silver ribbons float in the air. Now 1 World Trade has risen from the ashes. Classic modernist skyscrapers are back in fashion. Taste, like the New York skyline, remains a never-ending work.
Of the new buildings, I like 432, designed by Rafael Viñoly, and the studied jumble of 56 Leonard, downtown (Herzog & de Meuron are the architects). Of the new buildings, I like 432, designed by Rafael Viñoly, and the studied jumble of 56 Leonard, downtown (Herzog & de Meuron are the architects). Из новых зданий мне нравится 432, спроектированных Рафаэлем Виньоли, и тщательно продуманная мешанина из 56 Леонарда в центре города (архитекторы Herzog & de Meuron). Of the new buildings, I like Rafael Vignoli’s 432 and Leonard’s elaborate hodgepodge of 56 in the city center (architects Herzog & de Meuron). Из новостроек мне нравятся 432, спроектированные Рафаэлем Виньоли, и 56 Леонардов в центре города (архитектор Herzog & de Meuron). Of the new buildings, I like 432, designed by Rafael Vignoli, and 56 Leonards in the city center (architect Herzog & de Meuron). They are intricately designed to beautify the skyline. Others rising up, such as 53 West 53rd Jean Nouvel, next to the Museum of Modern Art, and 111 57th Street, designed by SHoP Architects, promise to help tip the scales back to old-fashioned ideals. The towers are ready-to-go boxes that have supplanted these buildings for decades.
Some still fear that there are dozens of palaces of magnates in the city. They can take solace in the fact that the ultra-tall phenomenon was a game of financial chairs. New federal regulations aimed at combating shell companies and money laundering now require cash buyers of luxury homes to disclose the real names of their owners. It turns out that about half of the purchases of real estate in Manhattan are paid in cash, and a third of all acquisitions of new apartments in the city center are foreign buyers. Combined with falling oil prices and fluctuating yuan exchange rates, the new rules appear to be having an impact. For now, the 800+ foot condominium market continues to decline. Some ultra-tall apartment buildings on the drawing board may be delayed.
Corporate executives no longer require flashy new corporate buildings. They are more suitable for millennials who prefer refurbished buildings, street life and workplaces. Architect Bjarke Ingels recently designed several towers in New York with huge soaring terraces that take the fun of the street into the air.
“The trend is to create enclosed spaces with floor-to-ceiling windows so you are boxed in,” Ingels said. “Open space used to be considered a nuisance that didn’t affect the value of a building, but I think that’s changing. I’m starting to hear people in the rental business saying they need open spaces. This is in both residential and commercial real estate.” “So. I think the 800-foot future is more about interacting with the outside world than running away from it.”
May be. New York is very windy and cold. For years, my aunt rented a lower-floor studio apartment on the 16th floor of a building in Greenwich Village, with a patio overlooking Washington Square Park and lower Manhattan, although most of the views are low. tall buildings, black tar roofs and fire escapes. The sun-bleached green and white canvas canopy can be unfolded to create shade on the terrace. From the street came voices and car horns. Rainwater splashed on the terracotta floor. In spring, a breeze blows from the river. When I’m in New York, I feel like the happiest person in New York, at the top and in the heart of the city.
Everyone’s sweet spot is different. I’m standing at Window 1 World Trade at 1000 feet with Jimmy Park. He appreciated the views of Brooklyn and Queens. Directly below us is the rooftop of 7 World Trade, the adjacent 743-foot glass office tower masterfully conceived by David Childs, directly below us. We can only understand the mechanics. The guy standing there could be Harry Lime’s point.
I asked Parker how tall he thought she was. He rubbed his forehead. He said he didn’t really think about it. ♦
Michael Kimmelman is an architecture critic for The New York Times. His last publication in the magazine was about Manhattan’s secret pools and gardens.
Matthew Pillsbury is a photographer. His work will be exhibited at the Ben Ruby Gallery in New York in 2017.
Once known as the Freedom Tower, it is the tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere and has the fastest elevators. The high-speed elevator travels at 22 miles per hour and rises from the ground to the 100th floor in less than 60 seconds.
Thirteen years after 9/11, hundreds of Port Authority employees were the first passengers to return to work at the site.
The first skyscraper to be built “core first” in downtown New York, where the building’s concrete core, which houses elevators, stairs, mechanical and plumbing systems, is built before the outer steel frame. trade unions of the city Boycott of metallurgists.
“Many buildings lack personality,” said Robert A. M. Stern, architect of the tallest new condominium in downtown New York. “You don’t want to go on a second date with them. But you may develop romantic feelings for our building.”
Both the building and the Chrysler Building claim to be the tallest building in the world, and both are under construction. Once known as 40 Wall Street, it remained for less than a month until a spire was added to the Chrysler Building. Less than a year later they were overtaken by the Empire State Building.
Insurance company American International Group vacated the Art Deco building in 2009 and is currently converting it into a $600 million hotel and rental apartment.
When completed, the building formerly known as 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza was the city’s largest commercial office building for a quarter of a century, the largest single-roof banking facility ever built, and the first in New York City to use the “1 Chase” building. , , Plaza” as a business address.
Named Jenga Tower after a design by Pritzker Prize-winning architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the building’s cantilevered floors extend in all directions from its central axis.
When architect Frank Gehry was having lunch with real estate developer Bruce Ratner, Ratner asked him, “What do you want to build in New York?” Gehry sketched an architectural design on a napkin.
The Art Deco building’s spire is designed as a mooring mast and its roof is a zeppelin warehouse, passengers will use the outdoor terrace on the 103rd floor and clear customs on the 102nd floor. The updraft around the building disrupted the airship’s landing plan.
The first of 16 new towers planned for Hudson Yards at a cost of $25 billion. The building has its own combined heat and power plant and is connected to the city utility and microgrid along with several other nearby power plants.
Walter Chrysler refused to pay architect William Van Alen after his self-funded building became the tallest building in the world. Van Alen sued and eventually got his money, but never again received major design commissions.
In 2005, MetLife moved its 1893 conference room, including the original gold leaf ceiling, hardwood floor, fireplace, and chairs, to the building’s 57th floor.
It is the first commercial high-rise building to achieve LEED Platinum certification, the highest environmental rating a building can achieve. Bees live on one of the receding rooftops.
When it was proposed and approved in 1999, its developer Donald Trump called it the tallest residential building in the world, but faced strong opposition. Former Yankee Derek Jeter bought the penthouse in 2001 (he sold it in 2012).
The nine-story “pillars” of the Citigroup building make it possible to place the church in one of the corners of the site. The roof is at a 45-degree angle and is designed for solar panels, which have never been installed since the roof does not face the sun directly.
The building that is still known as Rockefeller Center originally consisted of 14 buildings and employed tens of thousands of workers during the Great Depression, including 11 steel workers pictured here on the 30th floor of the Rock (now Comcast University) photo of lunch on a beam. their feet dangle 850 feet above the ground.
The part-commercial, part-residential building on the site of what was once Alexander’s Department Store includes a courtyard inspired by New York City walls such as Grand Central Station and the New York Public Library’s Main Branch Reading Room.
Currently the world’s tallest residential building, it was inspired by garbage cans and designed around what its architect Rafael Vignoli describes as “the purest form of geometry: the square.”
Due to a miscalculation during construction, the building ended up 11 feet above the limit set by city planners. Retroactive approval was not granted; instead, the developer paid a $2.1 million fine, part of which was intended to renovate a dance rehearsal space near downtown.
Post time: Dec-16-2022