When you’re building a skyscraper in the Big Apple, you need to follow three key rules to win over New Yorkers. First of all, make sure you fit in and add value. In other words, do not mess up the skyline. Secondly, all style and no substance is a recipe for a backlash. So, building ultra luxury homes for the mega rich in a city that’s facing a housing crisis is going to go down like a lead balloon. And third, do not under any circumstances do what the team behind New York’s latest skyscraper is doing.
Can anyone legitimately argue that New York skyline isn’t the most iconic in the world? The Big Apple has the most recognizable cluster of buildings on this planet.
From Billionaires Row to the rectangular Central Park and the tip of lower Manhattan, this place really is one of a kind. In years gone by, you could appear from virtually any avenue, subway, or bus, and use the Empire State, Krysler, and Walworth buildings like constellations to guide yourself around Manhattan. But those days are fast becoming a distant memory. That doesn’t mean New York’s losing its identity, but it might be losing its soul. and 262 Fth Avenue kind of epitomizes how. Now, on the face of it, the city’s biggest gripe with this tower is to do with the building we really hope you’re familiar with if you subscribe to this channel.
The Empire State, one of the most famous skyscrapers ever. It is to New York, what Big Ben is to London. The Eiffel Tower is to Paris, and the Lean Tower of Pisa is to, well, Pisa. But what on earth has 262 Fth Avenue, a 262m pencil thin tower, got to do with New York’s art deco darling? Well, even though it’s nowhere near being a super tall, it does a pretty fantastic job of getting in the way.
You see, Lower Fifth and Madison Square Park used to offer some of the most defining angles of this great tower, but now with this new structure in the way, you wouldn’t even know the Empire State Building was there. and New Yorkers have some thoughts about that. Now, inevitably, the construction of ever more buildings means that New York will continue to see its most iconic old skyscrapers become a bit lost in the concrete jungle.
Cities like London and Paris have passed regulations to protect the sightelines or views of their key landmarks. But New York hasn’t done that, and the chances are it never will. >> You buy a piece of land in New York, you should be able to do with it what you want. is the attitude of many people and even restricting that slightly to landmark things or preserve districts.
As I said, there’s a huge fight every time. There are things that to my mind are no-brainers that should be protected that have been demolished. So, the idea of protecting a sighteline is pretty alien from our civic culture, so to speak. And I just I I don’t see absent a huge sea change in the attitude about development. I I don’t really see it happening. >> Getting in the way is one thing, but getting in the way and failing to inspire New Yorkers with your design is kind of asking for trouble.
I think people would be more willing to grudgingly accept an interloper like this into their neighborhoods, into their views, into their economics if it were an exciting building. And from what I’ve seen so far, 262 is not particularly exciting. It doesn’t have a lot of character.
And I think, you know, people get frustrated by something that, as I said before, is taking some of their light and air and resources and not giving enough back, whether the giving back is housing or aesthetics.
262 Fifth Avenue was designed by the Russian architecture firm Megaome, which is taking on its first commission in the US. And while the pencil thin aesthetic isn’t exactly getting a lot of love, the frustrations go quite a bit deeper than just the view. Rising to that 262 m height, you’d think that 262 Fth Avenue would offer a lot of new properties for Manhattan. But that’s not how things work in this city.
There’s a huge amount of money around and the super rich are looking for somewhere to invest their wealth. So, if a developer can offer very high-v value apartments, they stand to make a lot of money. Q projects like this that feature enormous wholefloor residences worth an absolute fortune. 262, although still impressively tall, will have just 26 properties across its height, each averaging 3,200 ft of floor space.
Now, if you’re finding that hard to conceptualize, don’t worry, because we’ve got you covered. For context, the average apartment in Manhattan is just 740 square ft. And that right there is one of the reasons that buildings like this catch such flak from everyday New Yorkers. Architectural styles and views being obscured is one thing, but the deeprooted wealth gap is quite another. And for many, developments like this personify the problem.
They stand as a response to the demands of the investment market, not the housing crisis. Their architecture is about maximizing a financial return, not creating shelter. It’s something that the architects and author Matthew Souls talked about in his book, Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin.
Architecture is under a tremendous amount of pressure to satisfy the investment kind of absorption role. The result is what Matthew describes as a mutation of our built environment. Whole floor apartments with no neighbors to create problems. No backyards to maintain.
Open plan living that fetches a higher price. Structural cores completely relocated. In many ways, some of today’s developers aren’t really building homes. They’re building financial assets. Safety deposit boxes for the uber wealthy. Take a closer look at the architecture of 262 Fth Avenue, and it does appear to be a recipe for much of the same kind of thing. It rises to a considerable height, but from a very small sight footprint, as its developers work to optimize their return.
The result is a building with a width to height ratio of 1:19, meaning it’s 19 times taller than it is wide. For context, you know the incredibly tall Empire State Building that 262 is blocking views to? Well, that has a width to height ratio of 1:3. And 432 Park Avenue, famed for its crazy slender design, has a width to height ratio of 1:15. Now, as any regular viewer of the B1M knows, a key challenge with all skyscrapers is the impact of lateral wind loads, something that gets even more pronounced with a slender building.
If those wind loads are too great, it can cause a building to sway. Now, if you look closely, you’ll see that 262 has a gap about 2/3 of the way up its structure. That’s designed as a wind break to allow air to flow through. It limits something called vortex shedding, where different speed air currents can form behind a structure, pulling it back and forth. One of the facads is also fitted with an aluminium and triple glazed curtain wall system.
A non-structural covering which should help further decrease wind interference. That aluminium box on the side of the tower is another pretty significant mutation. It’s the core of the building, a structural spine that normally runs through the center of the floor plates and includes things like services, plumbing, lifts, and stairs. Here it’s been pushed to the side creating those open plan apartments. The result is that the apartments kind of sit like shelves attached to the backbone or outer core of the structure. In fact,
Meganome said they wanted to put people on viewing platforms in the air.
While interior architects Norm praised the expansive column-free residences that offer full floor customization. translation, high investment potential, apartments that are worth even more money. It all comes back to what Souls talks about, the apparent manipulation of architectural design to satisfy investment demands.
Less of a mutation and more of a great design feature. The box at the top of the building is planned as an exclusive viewing platform that developers hope residents are going to be able to reserve for private events. That is, if anyone ever lives there full-time. It’s not completed or opened yet, but this tower does appear to have some of the ingredients that could see it fall victim to a phenomenon that Solves describes as zombie urbanism, where properties are owned but not occupied.
Too many buildings like that starts to become a problem for our cities. They’re still there, but their essence, the citizens that made them great in the first place, are not. On the face of it, to the outside world, New York still looks like New York. Its body is still there, but its soul is being steadily hollowed out. >> You’re living in Manhattan. Of course, they’re going to be tall buildings go up and mess up your view. You know, you you don’t like that move to Kansas. That said, again, this particular one bothers people, I think, because so much of the building will be so empty so much of the time.
Very often the overseas buyers who buy these very large apartments use them to kind of stash cash outside their economies. So they buy these apartments and they use them one day a year if that. >> That’s a real rub in New York which is facing a pretty severe housing crisis. There aren’t enough affordable properties to go around. And in all honesty, the word affordable is pretty subjective. If you earn less than $70,000, then the chances are that more than 50% of your income is going to go on rent in New York.
And the city is reportedly only building about half as many homes as it needs each year. The cost of housing is constantly climbing. And so, billionaire towers with apartments that may rarely, if ever, get lived in can feel very frustrating to your average New Yorker. >> It’s one thing to put up a building with a thousand apartments in it. If you live in that neighborhood, you may want it, you may not want it, you may just you may find it awful, but at least you can say that’s doing something about the severe housing shortage that so many New Yorkers are dealing with right now.
This apartment serves perhaps 50 people. And because of its price point and because of the scale of its apartments, many of them will uh likely be overseas buyers who aren’t even there. So, we’re losing a view, we’re losing a lot to people who aren’t New Yorkers and comparatively few of them.
And that drives people nuts. The housing crisis is a real concern that doesn’t look set to be fixed anytime soon.
And what’s frustrating is that this was kind of predictable. New York has built its reputation on capitalism and expansion. Developers are often looking for ways to increase their margins. And sadly, profit isn’t found in buying a plot like this. Building a 262 m tall tower and putting 100 apartments in it.
Selling 100 of those homes for $700,000 each might net a gross income of $70 million. But apartments or assets in 262 are expected to start around $16 million. Selling all 26 of those will land developers $416 million at the very minimum. There’s not a lot of 20story buildings going to be put up in New York anymore because that same plot of land can house a much taller building with a lot more apartments and it’s expensive to build up for sure, but it’s more expensive in some ways not to.
262 Fifth Avenue isn’t exactly alone in what it represents. It’s one of a number of pencil thin luxury towers in this city, but it just happens to grab headlines because of its impact on the iconic Empire State Building. Blocking sight lines might not be the end of the world.
After all, it’s development that drives the city forward. And New York doesn’t really have regulations protecting the sightelines of certain buildings. It was never going to stop building or stop growing just because certain people or certain visitors wanted to keep the views of buildings that they quite liked.
The bigger issue is how some of the world’s richest people are now using this city as an asset base because that eats away, like I said, not at New York’s identity, but at its soul. Don’t forget that we’re inspiring the next generation of builders through our investment into Brick Borrow, a fantastic LEGO subscription service.
