Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Not sure how someone can simultaneously be a urbanist and yet opposed to small, irregular building footprints, which are pretty much the secret sauce of urban street level vitality. Small lot sizes preserve historic landscapes and add interest and variety to streetscapes.
That said, if you prefer fat, blocky towers, those are more the norm, everywhere, even in Manhattan. Grand Central and Hudson Yards will have the biggest skyline changes in the coming years, and those towers have enormous footprints. There are 3 million square ft. office towers planned and u/c in these areas.
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This is a discussion purely on skyline aesthetics, and so I have to take off my urbanist's hat as a result of the dichotomy that can occur between skylines and street-level urban experience. In that perspective, although the current Billionaire's Row towers that are form-fitted into the existing streetscape are preferable to razing a block for such a development, it's unrelated to the aesthetic from afar. If I were talking about my ideal urban planning framework there probably wouldn't be any supertalls, and certainly no mega-block developments or even floorplates over 20,000 SF. As an observer of a skyline from kilometers away however, substantial towers like Metlife, Worldwide plaza, or even Solow do much more for me than pure height in the form of a Steinway.
That being said, I would also debate the point that a small footprint instantly makes a building a better contributor to the urban fabric. A combination of small footprints can be the secret sauce when they create variability in street frontages and uses. I think most of us picture perhaps a grocery store next to a mom-and-pop Italian restaurant, next to an independent tailor who's been there for 60 years. A small lot with frontage dedicated entirely for private access to $5 million+ condos doesn't invoke the same feeling, but maybe that's just me. This argument also seems based on the assumption that if we didn't have these pencil towers, there would be giant podium style developments instead. Does it have to be one or the other?