http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/20...-new-york-city
Too Rich, Too Thin, Too Tall?
PILLAR OF SOCIETY An aerial view of One57 and the shadow it casts over Central Park, dwarfing those of its neighbors.
By Paul Goldberger
May 2014
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Ever taller, ever thinner, the new condo towers racing skyward in Midtown Manhattan are breaking records for everything, including price. Sold for $95 million, the 96th floor of 432 Park Avenue will be the highest residence in the Western world. As shadows creep across Central Park, Paul Goldberger looks at the construction, architecture, and marketing of these super-luxury aeries, gauging their effect on the city’s future.
These days, it is not just a woman who can never be too rich or too thin. You can say almost exactly the same thing about skyscrapers, or at least about the latest residential ones now going up in New York City, which are much taller, much thinner, and much, much more expensive than their predecessors. And almost every one of them seems built to be taller, thinner, and pricier than the one that came before. Few people are inclined to mourn the end of the age of the luxury apartment building as a boxy slab.
But what is replacing it, which you might call the latest way of housing the rich, is an entirely new kind of tower, pencil-thin and super-tall—so tall, in fact, that one of the new buildings now rising in Manhattan, the 96-story concrete tower at the corner of 56th Street and Park Avenue, 432 Park Avenue, will be 150 feet higher than the Empire State Building when it is finished, and taller than the highest occupied floor of the new 1 World Trade Center. And construction on an even taller super-luxury building, 225 West 57th Street, is scheduled to begin next year, so 432 Park’s reign as the city’s tallest residence and second-tallest skyscraper will be short-lived.
These buildings are transforming the streetscape of Midtown and Lower Manhattan, and they are transforming the skyline even more. Two new luxury apartment towers in the super-tall category are going up in Tribeca, at least so far. But the biggest impact has been in Midtown, in the blocks between 53rd and 60th Streets, where seven of the new condominiums are either under construction or planned. Four of them are on 57th Street alone, which day by day is becoming less of a boulevard defined by elegant shopping and more like a canyon lined by high walls. (And that’s just the buildings that have been announced. There are others rumored to be in the planning stages, including one that would replace the venerable Rizzoli bookstore, also on West 57th Street.)
“The super-tall, super-slender towers are a new form of skyscraper,” Carol Willis, the founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum, in Lower Manhattan, told me. At 432 Park Avenue, which was designed by the architect Rafael Viñoly for the developers Harry Macklowe and the CIM Group, each of the 104 apartments will occupy either a full floor or a half-floor, and the loftiest of them, a full-floor unit on the 96th floor, will be the highest residence in the Western Hemisphere, at least until the building at 225 West 57th Street goes ahead. Viñoly’s penthouse has already sold for $95 million to an unidentified buyer, which is close to $11,500 a square foot; the average asking price in the building was close to $7,000 a square foot, almost three times the average for Manhattan luxury condominiums last year.
In exchange for parting with this kind of cash, the residents at 432 Park will be able to look down on the Chrysler Building and just about everything else in Midtown, including their neighbors at One57, the 90-story blue glass tower at 157 West 57th Street, which will be completed later this year (although a number of units are already occupied). One57 was the first of this new generation of super-tall, super-thin, super-expensive buildings, and it is astonishing to think that its height of 1,004 feet, just 42 feet shorter than the Chrysler Building, will make it the tallest residential building in the city for a few months only, until 432 Park is finished, probably next year.
One57 attracted a lot of attention for the sale of one of its two largest apartments for the then unheard-of price of more than $90 million (to an investor group headed by the financier Bill Ackman)—and a lot more attention for the fact that its crane assembly broke loose and dangled ominously over the street during Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, requiring the evacuation of seven square blocks around the building. Its developer, Gary Barnett, of Extell, spent about 10 years assembling the site, and in 2005 asked the French architect Christian de Portzamparc to come up with a design. Even before the new wave of super-tall buildings, the condominium market in New York had become much more design-sensitive, and putting the names of well-known architects like Richard Meier, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, or Robert A. M. Stern on buildings has become a marketing advantage. In fact, at these prices it’s now gotten to be something of a necessity, the same way some women will only spend $3,000 or $4,000 on a dress if it has a famous designer’s name on it.
Unfortunately, sometimes the result seems more like the architectural equivalent of a fancy label sewn into an ordinary garment. De Portzamparc—whose first building in New York, the sculpted glass LVMH tower, on East 57th Street, was widely acclaimed—first envisioned One57 as a slender glass structure with a few setbacks marked by curving roofs; he hoped that the overall effect of the design would resemble a cascading waterfall. Once he had been through the meat grinder of the New York City development process, not much of a sense of cascading water remained, and the final version of the building turned out to be a flattened composition in various shades of blue and silver glass, striped on some sides and speckled on others. If the tower’s slender height made it appropriate to New York, its garish glass made it look more like a tall refugee from Las Vegas.
Inside, however, the feeling is more luxurious, perhaps because, as Frank Lloyd Wright allegedly said about the Gothic-style Harkness Tower at Yale, the building’s interior is the one place from which you can’t see it. What you do see is Central Park and the city, spread out before you. Barnett, the developer, took me to the topmost penthouse on an exceptionally cold, clear day early this year, and the view of the park was nothing like what I was used to from windows 30 or 40 floors up in other buildings. From the 90th floor, you feel as connected to the sky as to the ground. The city is laid out like a map, and the enormous windows are less like frames for the view than wide-open portals to it. And inside, the high ceilings and large rooms make the place feel even less like a conventional apartment. The layout leaves an open vista through the apartment, so you can see north to the Tappan Zee Bridge and south to the new 1 World Trade Center tower.
De Portzamparc had completed the initial versions of his plans when the recession of 2008 began and real-estate development in New York ground to a halt. Barnett, a former diamond dealer whose quiet, understated manner masks a gambler’s instinct, was certain that the market would come back, and that when it did, most other developers would be caught with nothing to sell. If he could manage to start his building when things still looked bleak, Barnett thought, he would be ahead of the curve, the only developer ready with brand-new, super-luxury apartments when the next wave began. “We had a hole in the ground—what else could we do?” Barnett said to me as a way of justifying his decision to move forward. Still, his reasoning was counter-intuitive, since real estate usually lags economic recoveries rather than leads them. At a time when the best apartments in the city were going begging, the notion of adding a slew of new ones at higher prices than the apartments going unsold seemed nothing short of madness.
But Barnett knew he wasn’t building for conventional buyers who were subject to normal economic cycles. Like Nick and Christian Candy, the brothers in London who built the absurdly expensive One Hyde Park Tower, or Arthur and William Lie Zeckendorf, another pair of siblings in the development business, who finished 15 Central Park West just before the last downturn, Barnett had no illusion that he was building homes for people to actually live in. He knew that most of the apartments at One57 would be commodities for investment, sold to limited-liability companies that had been created to shield the identities of their rich owners, people from around the world who would spend, at most, a few weeks a year there. From time to time, Barnett figured, he would sell an apartment to a couple or a family who actually cared about what the place would feel like to wake up in every morning and to commute to work and take their children to school from, but these people, the ones for whom One57 would be a primary residence, were relatively few.
Barnett’s financing partners accepted his rationale that, since the apartments in his building were going to be bought by people who were largely insulated from the effects of the recession, there was no reason to wait until the economy had fully revived to get the project started. Mere confidence that the world was not going to collapse altogether was enough. He started foundation work on One57 in 2010, when the rest of the real-estate industry, which was putting up buildings not as commodities but as places for people to live or work, was still in the dumps. De Portzamparc, in an unhappy concession to tighter economic circumstances, simplified his design, making the building’s façades flatter. The design compromises were not matched by price concessions, however. One57’s initial prices averaged $5,889 per square foot, and sales moved at such a fast clip that Extell raised the prices several times as the building was going up.
Barnett famously refused to negotiate with interested parties, and they were not permitted into the building as it was going up. They could see nothing except plans and full-scale mock-ups of kitchens, bathrooms, and views in a sales center that Extell constructed in an office building two blocks away, its rooms lined with the same marble that was being used in the actual building. The center was intended to set a tone of such elegance that haggling over price would feel unseemly. A visit began with a 45-second film of flowing water that gradually took the shape of the building, an allusion to de Portzamparc’s idea of cascading water. From there a potential buyer would move into a room with a six-foot-high model of the building at its center, and then, if inclined to get serious, go through another series of doors into the mock-ups of kitchens and bathrooms. The notion was to capture the imagination and to move, step by step, from mood setting to reality.
It was enough to bring in a number of early buyers, including a Chinese mother who bought a modest ($6.5 million) unit for her two-year-old daughter; two investors, one from Hong Kong and one from Montreal, who are behind the financial success of the Michael Kors and Tommy Hilfiger labels and who each spent around $50 million on a full-floor unit; and Ackman, who put together a consortium of investors to buy an enormous six-bedroom duplex with a glass-enclosed “winter garden” at one of the building’s highest setbacks, on the 75th and 76th floors. They are presumably counting on the possibility that in a few years the apartment will be worth several times the $90 million they paid for it.
Because One57 is the first super-tall, super-thin building, it has become a lightning rod for criticism, and Barnett, who until now has been one of the city’s more publicity-averse developers, has assumed the role of lead public defender of the new super-tall towers. He was the only developer who appeared on the panel at a public forum about the new buildings last February, where he walked into a lion’s den of 425 people, most of whom seemed to view the towers with feelings ranging from dismay to outrage. He followed up his appearance with a piece in The New York Observer in which he claimed that One57 “will generate more than $1 billion in real estate, sales, hotel occupancy and other taxes” over the next two decades.
It is easy to think of the super-tall, ultra-luxury towers as a story more about money than about design, and to a certain degree it is. But if the first two buildings, One57 and 432 Park Avenue, are any indication, the interiors, at least, are designed to an exacting standard, with extremely high ceilings and expansive rooms to go with the awesome views, as if the developers realized that at prices upwards of $8,000 a square foot they couldn’t get away with the mean little rooms and cheap finishes that they might peddle elsewhere. As Barnett said to me, “They’re getting something for their $40 or $50 million.” (Well, yes, you’d hope.) He added, “These people don’t want to get squeezed into a small box.” Both buildings have elegant bathrooms that are more in line with what you would expect to find in a custom, one-of-a-kind interior than a developer-supplied one. And both buildings have spectacular kitchens, which will in all likelihood prove once again the maxim that in New York the better equipped an apartment kitchen is, the less cooking goes on within it.
Despite the garishness of One57’s exterior, I’m not ready to write off the entire super-thin, super-tall building type as incompatible with serious architecture.
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Last edited by NYguy; Apr 9, 2014 at 1:03 PM.
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