At worst, they’re considered nonsensical constructions that exacerbate the city’s affordable-housing crisis, contribute to climate change, and stand as totems to inequality. Many New Yorkers consider the city’s proliferating supertalls at best an eyesore-“Awful Waffle” is one nickname for 432 Park Avenue, a luxury condominium that looks like a strip of graph paper stuck on the Manhattan skyline. Their shadows can reach half a mile, and they can magnify the winds at street level, churning the air into high-speed gusts as far as three blocks away. Supertalls aren’t necessarily good neighbors. Steinway Tower, at 111 West 57th Street in Manhattan, under construction in 2019 (Jeffrey Milstein)
The architect Adrian Smith, who has designed numerous supertalls, contends that you’re in supertall territory not just when you hit 300 meters, but when you build so high that you get into “potentially unknown issues.” And, he acknowledges, there are “still mistakes being made.” In strong winds, occupants have reported water sloshing in toilet bowls, chandeliers swaying, and panes of glass fluttering. Like many cutting-edge innovations, supertalls can behave unpredictably. A 2021 article in the journal Civil Engineering and Architecture declared: “There is no doubt that super-tall, slender buildings are the most technologically advanced constructions in the world.” (The developer’s official name for the building is 111 West 57th Street.) These superslim buildings-and supertalls generally-have relied on engineering breakthroughs to combat the perilous physics that go with height. 2 pencil, and the skinniest supertall in the world. Steinway Tower is 24 times taller than it is wide-nearly as slim as a No. To put that in perspective, the Empire State Building (one of the world’s first supertalls, completed in 1931) is about three times taller than it is wide-“pudgy,” as one engineer described it to me. Early superslims shot up in Hong Kong in the 1970s, though lately they’ve become synonymous with New York City four supertall superslims loom over the southern end of Central Park in a stretch of Midtown dubbed “Billionaires’ Row.” Building engineers, like judgy modeling agents, have varying definitions of superslim, but they usually agree that such buildings must have a height-to-width ratio of at least 10 to 1. These buildings are alternately described as “needle towers” or “toothpick skyscrapers” (though not every superslim is a supertall). Some supertalls have an even more futuristic designation: superslim. In 2019 alone, developers added more supertalls than had existed prior to the year 2000 there are now a couple hundred worldwide, including Dubai’s 163-story Burj Khalifa (a hypodermic needle aimed at space), Tianjin’s 97-floor CTF Finance Centre (reminiscent of a drill bit boring the clouds), and, encroaching on my sky, Manhattan’s 84-floor Steinway Tower (a luxury condominium resembling the love child of a dustbuster and a Mach3 razor). First supertalls were impossible, then a rarity. There are skyscrapers, and then there are supertalls, often defined as buildings more than 300 meters in height, but better known as the cloud-puncturing sci-fi towers that look like digital renderings, even when you’re staring at them from the sidewalk. “All we’ve done in the 20 years since is build even taller.” “There were all sorts of symposiums and public statements that we’re never going to build tall again,” one former architect told The Guardian in 2021. Tall buildings that were in the works got scaled down or canceled on the assumption that soaring towers were too risky to be built or occupied. After 9/11, experts concluded that skyscrapers were finished. We’re living through the birth of a new species of skyscraper that not even architects and engineers saw coming. It was so tall, so thin, I began to doubt that the cross-hatching of metal beams could actually be a building.
The downside life supertall creaks breaks windows#
It rose above the brick building, then over the windows of neighboring apartments, walling off precious blue behind it. It couldn’t possibly get much taller.īut the skeleton kept stretching. When the metal skeleton of a skyscraper materialized beneath the crane, I told myself that the new building would top out soon. I consoled myself about the crane with the flimsy logic I once used after discovering a bedbug: It’ll go away!
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