[NYguy]

Some general, misguided thoughts on superall rising...


http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...rapers-be.html


By Justin Davidson
March 23, 2015

...That’s as high as Manhattan will climb for the foreseeable future. In the next half-dozen years, the Nordstrom Tower on 57th Street, by Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill, and Kohn Pedersen Fox’s One Vanderbilt, a likely neighbor to Grand Central Terminal, will both top out around 1,500 feet. Rafael Viñoly’s 432 Park, which now looks like a skewer in a pincushion, reaches just shy of 1,400. Seen from New York, the notion of a mile-high tower can seem like a distant, screwball real-estate venture, like an indoor ski slope in the desert or a fake Manhattan in China. “If we can build plenty of 50- and 60-story buildings, do we need any 120-story buildings?” asks the architect Jamie von Klemperer, who has an interest in the answer, since his firm, KPF, is designing the 65-story One Vanderbilt.

But just because there are no current plans to push a building’s height from profitable to narcissistic doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Manhattan is where global egos — and foreign money — come to roost, and there’s no telling what monuments they will choose to erect. Even a single Manhattan block could accommodate a 2,500-foot tower. A superblock — say, the one where Madison Square Garden now sits — could support something much bigger than that.

Although the next generation of superskyscrapers is likely to be built in other parts of the planet, they will still affect New York just by existing. The world’s tallest towers are outliers by definition, but a few 1,000-foot towers have already made their 800-foot sidekicks commonplace. Two or three contestants for the mile-high mark will sow an underbrush of half-milers.

New York may never again have the world’s highest anything, but those thin-air buildings halfway around the world will surely pull the local skyline upward. The real question is how those taller structures will shape the city below. “The big advances have less to do with ultimate height than with the way skyscrapers meet the ground, the way they’re intertwined with public space or the way public functions get integrated,” von Klemperer says.

That applies to One Vanderbilt, an office building that thousands of people will enter or cross through every day. Its base is stitched to transit, and its design needs government support. It is, in that sense, partly a public building. But a new economic lunacy is reshaping the skyline: the fact that a very few will pay vast sums for a tiny number of apartments that they rarely occupy. Their developers are selling a bizarre mixture of privacy and ostentation, and they require no approvals, which means they have no reason to care what the public thinks. That raises major moral questions.

Supertall, superskinny towers benefit hardly anyone, but their impact is citywide. The first time the confluence of technology and economics started reshaping the skyline, the city responded with the 1916 zoning code, which required tall buildings to recede as they climbed so that light and air would penetrate to the city’s lower zones. Those rules didn’t cap height or sap New York’s real-estate energy; rather, they gave us the classic setback tower — the Empire State Building, for example.

Now that we see how tall tomorrow’s tallest buildings will be, and how common the runners-up, we must adapt again. We could protect certain view corridors, as London does, or limit the shadows a tower casts, or impose an automatic public review on any building over 1,000 feet. What we need is a new ethics of the skyline — a way to wrestle with the question posed by SOM’s Ken Lewis: “Whom does the sky belong to? Given the density we live in, and given that the sky provides daylight to all of us, does someone else have the right to take it?”