The Skyscraper Museum has created a new web project that explains an emerging form in skyscraper history that has evolved in New York over the past decade: the super-slender, ultra luxury residential tower.
These pencil-thin periscopes — all 50 to 90+ stories — use a development and design strategy of slenderness to pile their city-regulated maximum square feet of floor area (FAR) as high in the sky to as possible to create luxury apartments defined by spectacular views.
The basic, yet complex principles of the economics, engineering, and design of this new type of super-slender towers were detailed in The Skyscraper Museum’s 2013/14 exhibition SKY HIGH & the Logic of Luxury, and have been revisited for an updated web-feature that presents line-ups, charts, images, and detailed information on 18 slender skyscrapers that in May 2016 are either completer or in early stages of construction.
From the the Central Park-adjacent “Billionaire’s Row” of 57th street to Lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, the defining characteristic of these 18 towers is not height, but slenderness. Featuring commanding views and luxurious amenities, this group of New York’s Super-Slenders have been designed by thirteen different architectural firms in a wide range of styles from historical to avant-garde and clad in materials from limestone to all-glass curtain walls, while their shared proportions underscore that the slenderness development strategy is the unifying characteristic of the new typology.
Starting from Sky House (completed in 2008), which is the both earliest and the shortest of the slender tower type and ending with the tallest, Central Park Tower (in May 2016 in the early stages of construction), which is reported will rise to 1,569 feet, The Skyscraper Museum’s latest online list provides in-depth information on the design and development — a unique “logic of luxury” — of these headline-grabbing skyscrapers.
Event Details:
Location: The Skyscraper Museum – 39 Battery Place, New York, NY 10280
Hours: Noon – 6 PM, Wednesday – Sunday
Admission: $5; $2.50 for Students and Seniors
