You might want to check out a site like Wired New York (
http://www.wirednewyork.com/) before making such comments. UT is hardly the definitive place to judge New York.
Just at the World Trade Center site there's four 1000+ footers going up. Then there's Bank of America going up (will be the second tallest in New York until the WTC is finished). Then there's the countless 50-60 storey buildings going up that would impress us here that are just blending into the existing skyline in New York. They have a lot going on.
WNY would give you a better perspective on the New York City end. But as a number of threads on that website illustrate, the battle rolls on about Chicago versus New York in the planning and execution of supertalls in the US. Investments in time and monies to these enormous structures plain and simple - boggles the mind.
Having recently been in NYC for three months working on a mid-rise development, and calling Chicago home for some time now, I have been immediately drawn to the following paradox:
- New York has considerably more skyscrapers than Chicago, by a factor of three or more.
- Chicago, however, has a larger composition of supertalls among its skyscrapers than New York.
You might want to explore this a bit more to gain a better perspective - starting with the term itself.
“Supertall” was originally an enthusiast’s term, to separate the tallest skyscrapers from the rest of the pack – it was sometimes unclear what constituted a supertall, and what didn’t, but it was usually based on height above grade, rather than say the number of storeys or the type of skyscraper structure. Gradually, the "official" skyscraper community, broadly defined – including architects, structural engineers, even architecture critics and developers – began to accept this term and set the dividing line on height at about 1000 feet. (I suspect this mark will move up in height, and eventually be given in meters/metres rather than feet.)
Until the 1990s, supertalls had their greatest relevance in the US. Using the term retroactively, New York began the supertall via the skyscraper race in that city during the 1930s. That race to build the tallest, yielded two icons: the
Chrysler and
Empire State buildings. And New York continued to dominate this primarily American phenomenon all the way into the late 1960s, when Chicago entered the picture via
SOM/Chicago with the supertall
John Hancock building, followed by
Sears Tower in the mid 1970s. The brilliant work of structural engineer Fazlur Kahn at
SOM/Chicago in re-thinking the framing of such buildings is the stuff of legend. In a few years, Chicago carried the mantle of having the greater number of tall buildings in the top five in height in the US, surpassing New York, and remaining in that position until this very day. And there may be more, based on the proposals we are now hearing in the South and West Loop areas.
Why has this been the case? Although there is not enough space to go into detail here, it has something to do with:
- Civic will of Chicago to set a goal in this particular area in both the political and business communities
- Innovative developments that uniquely allowed Chicago to build taller after the the late 1960s
- Effective ways that the city used to enable and then prioritise each supertall to get it into the construction phase
- Adapting to changing markets for the supertall throughout - such as office, mixed use or residential
The legacy of Chicago's skyscraper history does play into this process in a way that is difficult to explain. Even as Chicago has pursued this direction of building supertalls, one must acknowledge that there have been failures along the way. It's well known, for instance, that Chicago has tried several times to get a building to the 2000 foot barrier, guarded by the FAA/FCC in the US. Then Calatrava's project came along, and after two developers, name and design changes, then taking a high-risk scenario of building without presales, this project is still going ahead, and is actually under construction! Boldness is what defines supertalls in these two cities (as well as elsewhere). I cheer them both for what has already been built, and the exciting projects that are still on the table.
