Why The World’s Tallest Apartment Buildings Are On The Same NYC Street | Architectural Digest

three of the tallest buildings in New York are right behind me on West 57th Street why are they all on one street it's partially Building Technology that's emerged very recently but also reasons going all the way back to 1811 in the original layout of the city Grid in the commissioner's plan I'm Nick Potts I'm an architect and today we're going to be doing a walking tour of billionaires Row in Midtown Manhattan [Music] when the commissioner's plan laid out these streets in 1811 essentially set up a hierarchy of East-West Streets between wide streets and narrow streets the zoning bonuses of simply because you're on a wide Street you get that much more height and that much more ability to build tall as opposed to a narrower Street such as 58th Street and if you think about the grid plan of Manhattan and 57th Street is the last wide Street before you get to Central Park so it's really the only one of the wide streets that has access to Central Park so why is West 57th Street the only place in the city that could have become billionaires row it's partially because of the original plan of the city in 1811 it's partially because of the proximity to Central Park and the commodification of views and it's partially because of the building technology and how over the past 20 years the advancements in materials and systems have enabled people to build so tall and so thin over my shoulder is the first Super tall building that was built on West 57th Street and really the seed of what would essentially become billionaires row of these super tall residential Towers so what is super tall it's a tower over a thousand feet 157 is a thousand and four feet tall going all the way back to 1811. these sorts of buildings were not on anyone's radar you know this idea of building super tall just didn't exist and this building type the residential skyscraper also didn't exist this is 2014 and you can see in 157 a little bit of trying to figure out what to actually do with the residential super tall there wasn't a precedent for what a residential super tall building would be so the architect Christian portson Park really relied on metaphor and the idea of the building was a waterfall and as you see with these towers anytime there's a new building type similarly to the Woolworth Building or a department store there's always a struggle to find the right language and this is probably one of those first experiments about do we embrace the tallness do we try to hide it behind a metaphor besides the metaphor it's a fairly straightforward what you would think of as a commercial building that is actually a residential Tower when this building was proposed it was almost like a shock the only thing that was this tall in this area was the Time Warner Center which is on the park and was controversial in its own right but 157 freaked people out and the imagery was almost terrifying there were these overhead views and it looked so tall and now that you look at it among the buildings that have grown up around it it actually looks quite short and just in the short amount of time between 2014 and where we are in 2023 you can see how much this area has changed and how much the building typology has matured thank you the tall building behind my shoulder is 432 Park Avenue this is 2015. the building is 1 397 feet tall and about 90 feet square and the big innovation that happened with this building and why it's so tall and skinny unlike 157 is that this building is all residential you think about a typical office building is 300 feet long and 100 feet deep it's a fragment of that and that's because everything that's in this is apartment so you don't have restaurants you don't have office buildings that have Peak loads of people coming and going the discovery or The Innovation with this building is realizing that with the residential Tower unlike an office tower where you need essentially one elevator for every 50 000 square feet for a residential building you need far fewer because you think about it there will be maybe three or four people on the floor at any given amount of time remember this is one apartment per floor so as in any luxury Residential Building address matters and Park Avenue particularly north of 60th Street or the park is as incredible amount of cachet and so what the developers did here in assembling the lot assembly is they actually found a certain slice of a lot that fronted on Park Avenue and gave it a Park Avenue address to give it the cashier Park Avenue though the bulk of the building is between 56th and 57th Street so all of the 57th Street super calls have because they're a new building type there's a huge amount of experimentation even in the style of the building and this building really is a sea change and thinking of a tall building is not being glass and you think about it in particular against 157 which was the building on 57th Street that immediately preceded this which is all glass and kind of Tethered to a metaphor the architect on 432 Rafael vignoli decided to express this in a big exoskeleton grid there isn't columns inside the building what you see on the outside of the building is the structure The Architects and Structural Engineers really brought back an older idea most skyscrapers have a curtain wall that does nothing and then the columns and structure is all inboard and with 432 the structure is the exterior so there's not lost square footage one other noticeable thing about 432 Park are the wind breaks periodically up the building and this is another structural implication of building doing any tall building is you have huge wind loads you create an open port of space up the building so the wind can move through it drastically reduces the pressure of the building behind me is 111 West 57th Street and from this far away one of the most noticeable things about the building is really its shape this is the narrowest skyscraper in the world and in order to achieve that sort of slenderness there's a huge amount of engineering that goes into it notably the sidewalls which are solid because the building essentially acts like a very vertical I-beam where the end walls are solid it's really two townhouses wide if you think about the structure of Manhattan blocks and these 25 foot wide Lots it's just a little bit wider than two townhouse plots and essentially as deep as one so just imagine something essentially the width of two townhouses stretched up to 1425 feet and what 111 does is it takes that sort of setback Tower form that we're familiar with the 1916 zoning code and essentially multiplies it and rather than have them be every 30 feet it's actually a very reasonable residential seven feet six inches or so so to provide a you know essentially something that's scalable for a terrorist for a resident so the relationship of the 1916 zoning code and the 1920s commercial setback Towers really resulted in this feathered setback shape where many residences and many apartments could get Terraces rather than essentially three which is what the sky exposure playing for a deeper setback would have mandated so this is a building that's really all about New York and trying to respond to both the city and the historical skyscrapers that existed before it which were also experimental in their time and also to the building that it's a part of it's 111 West 67th Street is technically an addition to the 1925 Steinway and Sons building by Warren and Wetmore who are the same Architects as Grand Central Station and the Steinway building is Landmark which is something that the developer was supportive of it actually rests within a courtyard of it so it doesn't change the Steinway building but it uses the air rights from a landmark building and transfers them over into the adjacent lot all these buildings are very complex three-dimensional financial and Zoning puzzles so the fact that this is added onto the sineway building kind of talks a little bit about some of the history of West 57th Street between its first era when it was a Mansion neighborhood that clustered around the Vanderbilt house to its current state as a row of super calls in that in between time it was really a corridor that catered towards musicians and Carnegie Halls across the street and that caused the clustering of people and companies that catered towards people who use and worked in Carnegie Hall to settle nearby so Steinway and Sons built their headquarters across from Carnegie Hall essentially to do this and at one point 57th Street was known as piano Row the developer took a huge amount of care towards making sure that the addition both responded to and respected the landmark and brought its language into the future and the materials are really used to bridge between 1925 West 57th Street and 2023 West 57th Street if you look at the Terracotta on the end walls it's taking the Terracotta language which was used a lot in the 1920s using some motifs from the Steinway building if you look at some of the molding profiles around the front entrances it's essentially translated into the shapes of the terracotta and then manipulated to create Shadows it responds to the Sun and to the changes in the day and makes the building something different to look at and interesting through the course of the days weeks and years and in the interest of full disclosure and also in case you haven't noticed how excited I am by this building I was actually the project architect for this building during its design phases with shop Architects the setback Terraces 111 has several bees but at the Windbreak floors it's really one of the only places that there's a Terrace that's not accessible to building residents and we even have a chance to get up into the top one of those Windbreak floors right now so right now we're on the 86th floor of 111 West 57th Street this is a Windbreak floor so similarly to 432 Park these very skinny Towers benefit greatly from having a Windbreak or a periodic cold through the building where wind can travel through and reduce the wind pressures moving across the building so you have these on this floor and two more below us on 111 and 432 Park has some as well as you can see off in the distance so in addition to these Windbreak floors they're also mechanical floors that exist on 432 Park they're actually within the same assembly so that donut in the middle is where the mechanical equipment is and they're also double height so it's a zoning height bonus that they use here on 111 the Floyd we're on is simply a Windbreak floor the mechanical floors are directly below us and the tune Mass damper which helps balance the building from swaying in the wind is directly above us another interesting thing here is it's also one of the few places where we can see the Terracotta up close because the Terracotta on 111 is on the side walls and not necessarily accessible to people these finials at the end of each of the setback Terraces are really the only three-dimensional expression of it and it's similar to you know the team when they're working through this was thinking of the similar finials on the Chrysler Building if you look at the Eagles they're about the same size as these so you know elements that are like this that are twice as tall as a person look pretty small from far away and it's a bit of the kind of eye trickery that happens whenever you're dealing with a very tall or large building [Music] thank you foreign right now we're outside of 35 West 57th Street and this is the only Survivor of West 57th Street's first residential phase when it was anchored by the Vanderbilt mansion just the end of this block at 5th Avenue and 57th streets which was the largest house in the city at the time and this building which was actually built for W.K Vanderbilt his brother's daughter as a wedding gift were exactly the kind of people that were living here it was people who were related to or wanted to be near the center of power in the biggest house in town however this didn't last long the house was built in 1891 by 1898 it had become too hustling and bustling this was at the dawn of Midtown which is what it is now anything south of the park was noisy and Commercial and by 1898 the bride had moved further Uptown you can see in the ornamentation this kind of Ozarks Brownstone carving this was a fairly impressive townhouse in its day but you can see the scale of it looks almost like a toy next to the new buildings [Music] behind me is the Osborne and this is the flip side to the townhouse residential development that was happening just a few blocks further to the east or on the Vanderbilt house by the 1880s this was already starting to emerge as an apartment house district and the Osborne was really the Crown Jewel in this this was obviously a very high class luxury building Osborne who is the developer of this owned a stone cutting business so it's very heavy masonry because you could get the material and was probably profiting on it so this was a very tall building of a time if you compare it with the townhouse further down the street you can imagine an 11-story building like this kind of looming over its neighborhood almost as a Prelude to what would come in the later phases of what would become billionaires Row in terms of the height and the technology this is really at the maximum of what would have been built out of a masonry building all the time you can think of it as being similar to the Monadnock building in Chicago which is 16 stories in Brick and has massive walls so the Osborne it's a stone building but it still is similarly have to be in bulky and really taking advantage of the weight of its material and it's a Romanesque style building which is perfectly suited to that it's heavy it's about expressing arches it's about heavy materials it's an interesting juxtaposition to think about the Osborne which was the tallest building of its District of its time back in 1890 to towering over it Central Park Tower at more than 100 stories [Music] above me is the tallest residential tower in the world Central Park Tower this is 1550 feet and similar to sineway or 111 West 57th Street it makes a creative use of a zoning bonus you can see how it cantilever is out over another landmark building the art students League immediately next door to it both giving them air rights to build over the rights that could have been built over the large students league but also crucially letting the building rotate so there's more Frontage by going over the art students League to get a little bit more Frontage facing the park which is just on the other side of the building from us aside from that this is probably the most conventional of the super tall buildings on 57th Street in terms of skyscraper design you can see like 157 it's a glass tower it's you know wrapped with glass on all four sides which gives views in a 360 degree direction from the building the floor plates are larger than what you see on 111 and on 432 Park because there is enough room with the art students League to project out a little bit and get a little few more apartments on each floor so instead of something like 432 where there's two or one Apartments per floor or 111 where there's simply one this has multiple Apartments particularly in the lower floors four or five on the lowest here then three then two then one so you can kind of see each vertical striation is a different model of planning the inside of the building going from large to small the spelling also crucially makes the use of the lower parts of the building which don't really make economic sense because they don't have views towards the park for other uses there's a Nordstrom department store occupying the ground floor real estate space to activate the ground plane and then in between there's also a hotel even though Central Park Tower is probably the most conservative in terms of architectural expression it's really the culmination of the Lessons Learned on the other super tall towers that have been built over 111 West 57th Street if you think about its height at 1 550 feet 150 feet taller than 432 Park which was kind of the first major one of these and also the real estate potential this has a Triplex that just listed for 250 million dollars so these buildings are both the competitive race to the top in terms of height but also in terms of speculation and finding unlocked potential to recoup the investment of buying what ultimately is very extensive real estate and this the ultimate expression of billionaires row and all we've been talking about with these super tall towers really could have only happened here on West 57th Street [Music]

Channel: Architectural Digest

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Id: Z9OceMW5hE8

Length: 15min 4sec (904 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 25 2023