Any visitor to New York over the past few years will have witnessed this curious new breed of pencil-thin tower. Poking up above the Manhattan skyline like etiolated beanpoles, they seem to defy the laws of both gravity and commercial sense. They stand like naked elevator shafts awaiting their floors, raw extrusions of capital piled up until it hits the clouds. — The Guardian

Hedge funder Ken Griffin has closed on a massive penthouse at 220 Central Park South, paying a record-shattering $238 million, according to sources familiar with the deal.

The Citadel founder has long been rumored as the buyer of the condominium’s most lavish spread — a 23,000-square-foot quadplex encompassing the 50th through 53rd floors of the limestone tower, developed by Vornado Realty Trust and designed by Robert A.M. Stern. The asking price was $250 million. — The Real Deal

As Art Basel kicks off this week in Miami the city has a new listing to boast about that comes with everything you would expect for the highest-priced penthouse in the area right now: a celebrity architect, more square footage than its competitors, ocean views that go on forever and, of course, an unusual luxury amenity... — Forbes

A new report by real estate agency Knight Frank finds that 153 properties in six cities’ “ultra-prime” category sold for a combined total of $6.6 billion in the last year, or an average of $43 million per house.

Hong Kong led the world in sales over $25 million, followed by New York, then London. — Bloomberg

The limestone clad mansion in Bel Air owned by the late TV executive Jerry Perenchio just got a price cut.

But at $245 million, the commanding French neoclassical residence, which measures 25,000 square feet, is still the most expensive listing on the open market in the U.S.

The property, which came up for sale last year for a staggering $350 million, has long been the cream of the crop among high-end estates. — Curbed LA

Rafael Viñoly is best known for designing 432 Park, the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere, but he makes time for private homes, too–at least when they have headline-making features like a bullet-proof glass facade. His firm was first tapped to design this Upper East Side townhouse by Argentinian billionaire Eduardo Eurnekian to serve as his home and U.S. headquarters, but it looks like he instead decided to list the finished product for $50 million. — 6sqft

Perhaps it’s not a surprise in a city where residential prices can reach into the stratosphere, but in Los Angeles, more than 17 percent of all homes are valued at over $1 million.

What may be more shocking is that L.A. doesn’t have the highest share of million-dollar homes. [...]

San Jose and San Francisco were No. 1 and No. 2, respectively. In San Jose, homes valued over $1 million made up 53 percent of the market. San Francisco’s million-dollar-share was at 40 percent. — The Real Deal

The construction of this and other so-called giga-mansions underscores a new gilded age in the United States and especially in LA. [...]

The splurge comes amid a housing shortage that has fuelled a homelessness crisis, with 57,000 people without permanent shelter in LA county [...]. The Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez compared the city’s hilltop mansions to giant tombstones marking the death of humility. — The Guardian

It will be built from the top down on a suspension bridge, modelled after and painted the colour of the Golden Gate bridge. At its base will be a new 1,075-seat theatre, and below that an excavation site that’s 4.5 times as large as the museum’s excavation. It is expected to cost over $300m. — The Guardian

The MIT project — the Managed, Reconfigurable, In-space Nodal Assembly (MARINA) — was designed as a commercially owned and operated space station, featuring a luxury hotel as the primary anchor tenant and NASA as a temporary co-anchor tenant for 10 years. NASA’s estimated recurring costs, $360 million per year, represent an order of magnitude reduction from the current costs of maintaining and operating the International Space Station. — MIT News

Good walls make good neighbours – but not, it seems, when they are made entirely of glass. Five residents of the multi-million-pound Neo Bankside towers, which loom behind Tate Modern like a crystalline bar chart of inflated land values, have filed a legal claim against the museum to have part of its viewing platform shut down. They claim that its 10th-floor public terrace has put their homes into a state of “near constant surveillance”. — The Guardian