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...

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What do you know about "Skinny Scrapers?"