Archinect - News

SHoP's 111 West 57th Street supertall tower is one important step closer to completion

2022-04-05T20:00:00-04:00

A milestone development on the way to what is one of the most anticipated new openings of the year as the exteriors have been completed on SHoP’s award-winning 111 West 57th Street supertall tower in Midtown Manhattan.

Once completed, the building will stand as the second-tallest residential structure in the Western Hemisphere and sit atop the landmark Steinway Hall building, which houses 14 of the 60 total full-floor and duplex residences located within the 1,428-foot-tall development.

Video courtesy of SHoP Architects.

The exterior is defined by a stepped design that tapers along the south-facing facade as it reaches ever skyward to create a dramatic visual statement in combination with an east-west oriented terra cotta pilaster cladding system and a 300-foot decorative steel crown.

Photo by Evan Joseph, image courtesy SHoP Architects.

Per the architects: “The intricate façade is designed to be viewed from multiple scales and vantage points: Terra cotta panels with 22 different ...

Australian architects propose improbably narrow 'skyscratcher'

2021-02-01T15:07:00-05:00

With a street frontage of just six metres, the Pencil Tower Hotel is barely wider than a terraced house. [...] Planning documents for the $35.6 million hotel, which are on exhibition until February 2, describe the “improbably narrow” tower as a “skyscratcher” because it is too thin to be regarded as a skyscraper [...].

The proposal for a 33-story new hotel tower in Sydney's Central Business District is catching attention for its ambitiously skinny proportions: designed by Sydney-based Durbach Block Jaggers Architects to stand 110 meters (361 feet) tall, the structure will occupy a narrow site that is only six meters (less than 20 feet) wide.

"Our proposal embraces this extraordinary attenuated quality, proposing a ‘column’ tower on a low scale podium," states the architects' project description. "The tower simulates the compression and extension of a column, through a continuous abstraction of the elements of a column: base, shaft and capital."

What do you know about "Skinny Scrapers?"

2019-08-08T16:09:00-04:00

Rising high in the skies over New York City, Chicago, Hong Kong, and other great metropolises are tall towers that appear impossibly slender. Fueled mostly by market demand from wealthy clients who desire spectacular views, the design and construction of these superslim, generally residential skyscrapers also depend on engineering advances over recent decades in building materials and damping technologies as well as careful coordination by the design teams.

"Slender" towers are beginning to pop up all over the world, notably, in cities like New York, where real estate is scarce, but the desire to maximize ROI is strong. "The limited space for new buildings in places like New York City generally involves small parcels of land, which means that these new structures tend to be both tall and slender," explains WSP director of building structures, Silvian Marcus, in a recent story by Civil Engineering, the official magazine of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

The structural acrobatics required for such structures, when coupled with the soaring real estate costs for a place like Manhattan, means that these slim buildings cater almost exclusively to the ultra-luxury market. These buildings often have "just a single apartment or condominium per floor," for example, with some penthouses selling "for as much as $90 million," according to the article.

What constitutes a bonafide "slender" building designation, exactly? According to New Y...