#The skinny skyscraper how to
#The skinny skyscraper windows

'It's Art Deco meets CATIA,' says Chris Sharples, AIA, a partner at SHoP involved with the project. And that updating of a native New York way of building sets a worthy precedent. The new take on terra-cotta, and the sensitive way the tower interacts with the adjacent historic Steinway Building, no doubt warmed the hearts of the Landmarks Preservation Commission overseers.

#The skinny skyscraper windows

The blocks will be stacked in strips between tall windows to create a kind of wavering, rippling effect-a challenge to the lingering blobitectural impulse still seen in so much new construction. And they will also be very New York: a system of terra-cotta blocks, to be supplied by craftsmen at venerable Boston Valley Terra Cotta in 26 distinct profiles, ranging in shape from the nearly traditional to the almost-futuristic. But the side walls, incorporating the lion’s share of the concrete and steel structure, are a new take on something old. The tower’s short walls will be finished with low-iron glass (to the north, overlooking Central Park) and various sun-beating systems (to the south).

Got five minutes to spare? Want to tell us what life is like in your city? Take the Time Out Index survey here. In other words, watch out: a super-skinny skyscraper might be coming to a city near you. New York is poised to receive plenty more in the next few years, while the likes of Sydney, London, Birmingham and Toronto all have them planned. It’s simply developers looking to cash in on absurdly high property prices.Īnd it doesn’t look like the construction of pencil towers will be slowing down anytime soon. Does anyone need to build that tall? Of course not. They’re usually glamorous, expensive statements intended solely for the super-rich. No matter the direct cause of pencil towers, however, there’s one commonality behind the vast majority of them. Combined, the FAR and ‘air rights’ rules actively encourage the building of super-tall structures on tiny areas of land. However, neighbouring buildings can buy that air off them if it isn’t being fully used, allowing them to build even higher. In simple terms, every building in the city is given a certain amount of air above it. It’s pretty complicated stuff, but essentially the smaller you build within the plot, not using up the entire base area, the higher you’re allowed to build upwards.ĭevelopers in New York can also buy so-called ‘air rights’ from surrounding properties. For one, the maximum height of a building depends on floor area ratio (FAR) of the building within its own plot. This makes it taller than Rafael Violy’s 432 Park Avenue (1,396 feet) and ONE57 by Atelier Christian de Portzamparc (1,005 feet). The skyscraper will be 1,428 feet or 435 meters tall. In New York, however, which is arguably the city that has seen the most dramatic increase in pencil towers over the past decade, the causes are slightly different. On completion, Steinway Tower will hold the title of world’s most slender skyscraper, with a width-to-height ratio of approximately 1:24.

So perhaps logically, as cities become more populated and overcrowded, the number of pencil towers is likely to increase. In the likes of Melbourne and Hong Kong, there is so little land in the centre of cities that developers choose instead to build upwards. In most places, super-skinny skyscrapers are built because of high demand for city-centre locations. So why are there so many of these structures being built? Well, the answer depends on where you are. So-called ‘pencil towers’ are defined as having a height-width ratio of 10:1 or skinnier, and plenty of them are popping up all over the world. New York now has so many that the area containing them all is known as ‘Billionaires’ Row’ (also named, of course, because apartments in the buildings have often fetched eye-widening sums).

However, the Steinway certainly isn’t the first skinny skyscraper.

#The skinny skyscraper how to

And, to be frank, as you can see above (it’s the tower on the left) it looks pretty ridiculous. Needle thin and sky high, the team behind New Yorks latest and most ambitious residential skyscraper face a unique challenge: how to build the worlds. You know those stick-thin, pencil-like skyscrapers that seem to defy reasonable laws of stability? Lo ok a bit weird, don’t they? Last month the skinniest skyscraper in the world, New York’s Steinway Tower, was unveiled, with a height-width ratio of 24:1.