22
850 feet
Theheight
of 30
Rockefeller
PlazaRENDERINGCOURTESYOFM18intelligencer
Cityscape:
Justin Davidson
Gravity, Wind,
and Neighbors
The challenges of
building the city’s
tallest apartment
building.
when central park tower at 217 West
57th Street officially tops out at 1,550 feet
on September 17, it will (if you don’t count
the 400-foot spire atop One World Trade
Center) become New York’s tallest building.
It has already transformed the skyline,
paired with the 1,428-foot residential nee-
dle on the next block at 111 West 57th. I re-
cently toured the construction site with the
building’s two Chicago architects, Adrian
Smith and Gordon Gill. Smith designed
the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa in
Dubai, as well as the future tallest, the
kilometer-high (3,280-foot) Jeddah Tower
in Saudi Arabia. Moving from sidewalk to
a gajillionaire’s aerie—a 15,898-square-
foot three-floor penthouse—we talked
about how a 131-story tower can possibly
fit into our city.
GORDON GILL: How well do you know the
building?
JUSTIN DAVIDSON: I can see it from all over
the city, including from my living room. At
first, I thought it was just the construction
hoist that was blocking my view of the
Empire State Building, but I guess not.
G.G.: One of the perils of living in an
urban context.
J.D.: From the street, this looks like sev-
eral buildings in one: a seven-floor Nord-
strom at the base, a wing to the west, a
cantilevered section to the east, and the
tower. How do they all hang together?
G.G.: The site goes from 57th through to
58th Street and all the way to Broadway.
When you’re designing a super-tall build-
ing, most of the time you’ll plant the con-
crete core in the dead center of the site. If
we had done that, we’d have wound up
with piecemeal retail. So the first move was
to slip the core to the side. When you do
that, the tower follows.
J.D.: So that’s how you get the section that
sticks out above the Art Students League?
G.G.: Right. A lot of people questioned
whether we had respect for that building
[an 1892 landmark]. But a lot of detail and
study went into that. They have a beautiful
skylight in north-facing studios for the
natural light, and we didn’t want to com-
promise that.
J.D.: They were worried about glare.
ADRIAN SMITH: Yes, but the exterior wall
above the Art Students League roof is solid,
with no glass, just a soft zinc surface, so you
get a very subdued reflection.
J.D.: How do you design such a huge
building to slot into such a dense area?
G.G.: Everyone wants a view of Central
Park, but we had a big building right in
front of us [220 Central Park South]. It’s
like being at the theater; if everyone’s in
rows trying to see the stage, nobody can see
anything at all. The solution is to stagger
the seats. When we moved the tower off-
center to get better retail spaces, we discov-
ered an opportunity to capture incredible
direct and oblique views. That’s why the
building is stepped and staggered in every
direction—north, south, east, and west—
walking all the way up to 1,550 feet. If you
look at this building from a distance, it has
a strong ethos and a sense of stability. On
the other hand, there’s a lot of movement.
The trick was managing all that activity
without getting overly effusive.
J.D.: It’s true—this isn’t one of those
seamless glass prisms. Do all those notches
and fins have any other purpose?
A.S.: It’s all about wind. The wind behav-
ior in Manhattan is unique.
J.D.: Because it’s bouncing around all
these other buildings?
A.S.: And because you get hurricane-
force winds.
J.D.: So how do you figure that out?
G.G.: We come up with the basic form,
then drop it into a scale model of midtown
and perform wind-tunnel analysis on it.
We tweak the shape, we cut it, we shift it,
we slide it. We have a pretty good intuition
about what’s going to happen, but we’re
always learning more about keeping every-
body comfortable and happy inside.
J.D.: Can you get a little more specific?1,396 feet
432 Park
Avenue, until
recently the
tallest
residential
building in
New York1,428 feet
The top of
(also unfin-
ished) 111
West 57th
Street, down
the block1,550 feet1,368 feet
The roof of
One World
Trade Center1,250 feet
The 102nd-
floor observa-
tory of the
Empire State
Building1,046 feet
The tip of
the spire of
the Chrysler
Building