and the public are always the owners of last resort.
the leaning tower of san fran got 7.8 million in property tax breaks to start with, and is now sucking in 30 million more public dollars to help shore it up
im sure it won’t take much - especially with so few owners in this nyc tower - for the city to be left on the hook
“No, that’s right: All the stops on the elevator are even-numbered. We make sure that every apartment has a bunk-bed in it. Yeah, the top bunk is counted as a floor. So anyway, here we are at the 18th floor, tell little Timmy his bed is on the 19th floor. The sensation of rocking and swaying in a strong wind is … a feature! It’s to rock you to sleep at night. That’s luxury, right there.”
Cheap construction. Sways. Flooding. Narrow emergency egress stairways. Definitely a donald drumpf project.
Ya ain’t missin’ much. Mom and I watched those Irwin Allen disaster flicks when they 1st came on (network) TV, primarily b/c so many great actors, I suppose. I thought they were OK, but were I to watch any of 'em now, I’d probably say, “I want my two and a half hours back!”
“It was shot in 3-B - three beers and it looks good!”
– Bob (or Doug) McKenzie
Sounds aboUt right, eh?
I’m working on a pedant pendant but given a tardigrade’s size that is clearly a piccolo rather than a cello violin.
The smallest violin in the Hutchins octet is the “treble violin”
You out pedant me. If you keep this up I’m going to have to calculate the approximate fundamental frequency of the d string.
ETA
Damn you pesky kids, I’ll never get that pendant
That’s a tall building. Now I really, really want to sneak into the penthouse, turn on all the taps (faucets), leave, and see what happens. How far would the water get before anyone noticed? And how much further would it get before anyone stops it?
I would play them a sad song, but my violin is poorly assembled from substandard materials.
That’s true for silly supertall needle projects like this, but dense vertical development is beneficial in any system (peak density is usually somewhere around the 10ish floor range rather than 100), not just capitalism. In a perfect socialist utopia sewer pipes will require materials, our transportation surfaces require materials. People obtain value from being in contact with each other and the needs of people require stuff. Density maximizes people contact while minimizing stuff.
Ten is too tall for the environment. Most people recommend four to six as the tallest these days.
Tall buildings do not make for pleasant liveable cities.
That would fit with how I felt about Carlisle as a location. No building is higher than ten floors. Most don’t go above three. There is a lot of green space because it is a really bad idea to build anything on the flood plain, especially as what were 100 year floods happen every five-ten years now. There are cows and sheep grazing on the common land just outside the city centre. They still manage to fit 80,000 people in a 3 mile by 5 mile city. If it wasn’t for the openly bigoted attitudes of some locals it would be a nice place to live, and maybe it will be someday.
I expect that a lot of middle class Americans would complain that the houses are too small though.
It’s a violin. Don’t make them feel bad about their totally weird anatomy that prevents them from playing it in their non-existent shoulders.
Even Le Corbusier, whose designs often didn’t take into account the needs and behaviours of actual humans, understood this. His massively influential “Towers in the Park” urban plan limited the height of residential structures to 12 storeys, with many being six or less. The clusters of higher towers in his models were intended to be office buildings, but American urban planners laying out public housing projects misinterpreted things (often deliberately) and made them the residential towers (similarly, the “parks” ended up being barren concrete plazas with just enough utility/mechanical nooks for criminals to hide in). This led to failures like Cabrini-Green and Pruitt-Igoe, which were effectively designed as low-quality high-density storage for “undeserving” humans.
Groups of high-rise residential towers up to 25 floors can work in certain “15-minute city” situations (e.g. along stretches of wide avenues or boulevards where pedestrian safety is an equal or greater priority as car traffic flow), assuming they’re well-designed and then properly maintained by landlords or condo/co-op owner groups. That’s not the case for these skinny safe deposit boxes for oligarchs sprouting along W. 57th St in NYC, any more than it was for those failed high-rise public housing complexes from the 1950s and 1960s – neither at either of these economic extremes were intended to be liveable homes (at least as most Westerners understand that concept).
But not when the men’s bathroom is upside down!
I have to admit, The Poseidon Adventure was one of my perennial favorites that usually got me out of having to attend Sunday night Sunday School when I was a kid (when you’re a Preacher’s Kid, playing hooky is not easy). Fond memories.
As somebody who works development, I can see your point, but IME and region it rarely goes vertical past the point of anything being inefficient (NYC and this building especially being outliers here). I’ve been involved in probably 20 different building projects over the past year in a large metro area and two have been over 10 stories, and only just (11 and 12 stories respectively). The vast, vast majority are 4-6 story buildings or complexes with as many 1 and 2-bedroom apartments as possible. These, of course, have their own set of issues environmentally and socio-economically, but it’s hard not to look at them and think how much efficiency could be gained by just tossing a few more stories on there (here is where I make it obvious that I’m not an architect or structural engineer).
This is all to point out how horrendously inefficient this building is as a whole; horrendous amounts of equipment and materials for a building with < 200 occupants is just mindblowing, to say nothing of the additional costs of even doing high-rise construction in one of the most densely developed areas on earth.
As a kid I was fascinated by movie posters for these movies featuring an “all-star” cast. Whenever I saw that little run of thumbnails along the bottom I would stop and look at them all.
Which becomes a problem when the developer tries to pack 350+ units in low-rise or mid-rise building, usually resulting in most of those apartments being 500sqf or less, with sunlight and airflow in short supply and the corridors becoming mazes. Toss in enough “luxury” amenities and put it in a desirable or gentrifying neighbourhood and they can still charge a premium price per sqf.
That said, high-density housing is definitely required in desirable greater metropolitan areas – SFH car-centric sprawl isn’t a sustainable way to go in the midst of a climate emergency and growing economic inequality, either. Late-stage capitalism just demands that “high-density” translates into higher and higher towers packed with smaller and smaller units (unless the building caters to the ultra-wealthy) that still cost a small fortune to own or rent.
This building’s architect, Rafael Viñoly, sums up the general unsustainable attitude amongst developers and their minions about global alpha cities: “There are only two markets, ultraluxury and subsidized housing.” [Source]
