![]() Nor are they pleasant to live in, it seems. ![]() Recently, Viñoly Architects were hoping to pull off this trick again at 249 East 62nd Street, by elevating the top half of the building, lamppost-like, atop an enormous ‘mechanical zone’, although the design has since been superseded.īuildings so tall and narrow look vulnerable rising to such a height, particularly when compared to nearby towers, such as Raymond Hood’s mighty Rockefeller Centre, which have a mountain-like solidity. This greedy spirit has owned it the local nickname of the ‘middle finger’. Critics allege, however, that these mechanical zones are unnecessarily large, making use of a loophole in the planning regulations that imposes no limit to the amount of square footage that they occupy. These are known as mechanical zones, which contain much of the equipment required for the spindly erection to stand so tall. An additional boost to its height comes in the form of the several empty voids along the shaft. It encapsulates the aesthetic by obsessively and monotonously repeating a single idea – that of a concrete grid – for the whole of its 426 metres. Completed in late 2015, this was the first of the ‘pencil towers’ to be built. Planning law was also used creatively by Rafael Viñoly Architects at 432 Park Avenue. The form is dictated by the need for the building to cantilever over plots whose air rights the developer had acquired. This process also explains its strange shape as designed by Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill Architecture: a series of rectangular masses stacked on top of each other, seemingly at random. The developer Extell achieved its height by slowly acquiring and then agglomerating the lucrative ‘air rights’ – the right to build upwards into the sky – of neighbouring buildings between 20. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesĪt 472 metres high, Central Park Tower is one of the eight super-tall buildings at the southern end of Central Park known as Billionaires’ Row. Today’s towers, statements of the developer’s soulless aesthetic writ huge, find their form by pushing planning laws to their limit and contravening their spirit in the process.Ĥ32 Park Avenue, designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects and completed in late 2015, has been nicknamed ‘the middle finger’. Buildings such as the Empire State were the product of zoning laws that came into force in New York in 1916 after the construction of the monolithic Equitable Building the year before buildings were now required to step back after a certain height to allow light to reach distant street below. So called because they rise to a height totally incommensurate with the tiny ground footprints they occupy, they express a mine-is-bigger-than-yours aesthetic in its crudest possible terms. ![]() These are the ‘pencil towers’ that have risen up over the city like the spines of a sea creature. Today’s super-tall buildings, however, communicate only the desire to squeeze as much money as possible out of single plot of land. They are the hallmarks of an age in which the future was genuinely exciting, a reminder that people once dreamed of walking around the city on high walkways built into skyscrapers, safe from the traffic below. The sleek Deco lines, stepped facade, and airship docking station at its summit (now just a platform for a still taller broadcasting antenna) all lent a sense of style to its slab-like form. However the Empire State Building deserves not to be put in the shade – and the buildings by which it is being overtaken are the result of a corporate rapaciousness that would make even the construction barons of the 1920s and ’30s blush. It seems typical of New York that a building that rose upon the crushed remains of what was once the city’s most glamorous hotel, the Waldorf Astoria, should be dwarfed by a series of even bigger mega-structures. Now, however, it is only seventh tallest building in New York, with its position in the skyscraper league tables seemingly dropping ever lower every year. This remained true until 2012, when it was overtaken by One World Trade Center’s replacement. ![]() After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the 443-metre-high Empire State Building became the city’s tallest building once more. A swarm of super-tall developments, many of them exclusively dedicated to luxury apartments, has appeared on the city’s skyline in recent years and, if its growth is not abated, risks ruining it. ![]()
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