Building Within The Context

Curbed was nice enough to map the tallest buildings in New York: existing, in construction, and planned. Given that the tallest spire is 1776 feet and the highest roof is 1550 feet, and the Burj Khalifa is 2722 feet high, we’re talking about the tallest in NYC and competitive within the USA, not internationally. It should be noted that a number of these buildings are extremely slender, which is arguably harder for structural design than additional height would be.

Why do I like most of these buildings when I’m trashing the Skyrise plan? It’s simple: context. Harlem was traditionally a neighborhood of rowhouses and low-rise apartments; the projects added a bunch of 20-or-so-story towers. The side streets in Harlem are quiet (as much as any neighborhood in Manhattan can be) and quite picturesque, with trees and the houses’ stoops. Moving every resident to one of a group of 100-story towers so that the existing buildings could all be razed completely ignores the context, substituting the planners’ vision.

All of the buildings in the Curbed list fit, one way or another, into New York’s zoning. The older buildings were constructed under the 1916 zoning law, which allowed a tower with a floor area of one-quarter the lot size or less to go up forever. Look at the long typical-floor shafts of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings: they are almost exactly one-quarter of the respective lots. The newer buildings were built (or are planned) under the modern zoning law, which provides an allowable bulk based on a ratio of the lot size. Much of midtown, for example, has an allowable ratio of 12 to 15, meaning that you can build a building with that much floor area. But there are ways to increase the ratio, including providing community uses (like subway entrances or space for non-profits) and buying your neighbor’s air rights. “Air rights” are the difference between the zoning theoretical maximum size of a building and its actual size.

The purchase of air rights for the series of supertall buildings along 57th, 58th, and 59th Streets has an interesting effect: it’s established an informal cap-and-trade system. The lower buildings that have sold their air rights can be replaced some day, but not by anything bigger than they are. So rather than a solid wall of 40- and 50-story buildings along that corridor, we have a series of very tall and slender buildings with the existing cityscape in between. This is traditional development in New York, where tall buildings rise next door to older ones. To this day, there are a number of old low-rise buildings on the same block as the Empire State, just a bit west of their more famous neighbor. In the context of midtown, this seems to make sense. (At least, it makes sense to everyone but Le Corbusier, who said fir publication that “The skyscrapers of New York are too small and there are too many of them.”)