From The Baffler:
A building is considered “ultra-thin” when its width-to-height ratio is at least 1:10. For context, the Empire State Building is about 1:3. The old World Trade Center was close to 1:7.
The new 111 West 57th is about 1:24. This super-luxury project designed by SHoP Architects has the distinction of being the world’s thinnest residential high-rise. It towers eighty-four stories and 1,428 feet over Steinway Hall—a landmarked sixteen-story former concert venue and piano store. Well-designed and well-reviewed, this skinny tower is best known for its upper half, which tapers off from its southern exposure as it angles toward the clouds. Whereas other nearby luxury high-rises look like stretched and distended sketches of smaller buildings, or like a single concept whose designer hit copy and paste on one hundred times, 111 West 57th at least meets some minimum standards of decent architecture.
It fails as high-density housing, however. In all, 111 West 57th contains just sixty condominiums. Of those, fourteen are in the old Steinway Hall. So the new part of the building—the assemblage of steel, glass, and terra-cotta that one sees lifting off into the skyline—has just forty-six apartments. The units are between one and three full floors each, with up to fourteen-foot ceilings and floor plans ranging from 3,873 to 7,130 interior square feet. Many have balconies and terraces. By contrast, the average size of a Manhattan rental apartment is 747 square feet. Instead of sixty gigantic condos, this building could fit 442 normal-sized apartments.
Each of its narrow condominiums contains features and fixtures signifying extreme wealth in a city also home to extreme poverty: counters of marble sourced from remote mines; freestanding soaking tubs; and, of course, views of the city that only a tiny few will ever experience for more than a moment in their lives. A three-floor, four-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bathroom penthouse in 111 West 57th is currently listed for $66 million; the cheapest apartment in the building is selling for close to $9 million.
The tower joins seven other slender skyscrapers on Billionaires’ Row (and plenty more in the surrounding area). Super-tall, super-thin, super-luxury buildings of this kind occupy outsized real estate in the minds of many New Yorkers. While for some they are just too damn tall, looming over the city and casting shadows over parks and gardens, it is not their height that bothers me. Tall buildings are not anathema to progressive urbanism. In fact, around the world urban skies were for a long time the realm of social housing developments. As Stephen Graham shows in his book Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers, the urban skyline was only more recently “luxified.” If I step out onto my fire escape in Hell’s Kitchen, I can see five-story buildings like mine that are permanently affordable limited equity cooperatives or rent stabilized tenements; I can also see five-story buildings that are high-priced condominiums and rentals. I can see fifty-story buildings that are subsidized through project-based Section 8 contracts; I can also see fifty-story buildings with condominiums that sell for millions of dollars. Height doesn’t cause or even correlate with the cost of the housing nearby. And even if most of the new luxury skyscrapers do look pretty dumb, there are plenty of crappy small buildings all over....
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