Harkening back to the Art Deco structures of New York’s Financial District, CetraRuddy’s 45 Broad Street is set to rise in Lower Manhattan. After a groundbreaking ceremony in April, construction on the project has now begun. Once complete, the tower will top out at a peak of 1,115 feet (340 meters), making it the second tallest building in lower Manhattan (behind only One World Trade Center) and the tallest residential building south of the so-called “Billionaire’s Row” in Midtown.
Canada’s future tallest building, The One, has broken ground in downtown Toronto. Designed by Foster + Partners, the 85-story building will become the country’s first supertall skyscraper (commonly defined as taller than 300 meters/980 feet), rising to a peak of 306 meters (1,004 feet). The tower will also take over the title of Canada’s second tallest manmade structure, behind only the CN Tower.
Located at the corner of Bloor Street and Yonge Street on the border between downtown and Yorkville, the residential tower will respond to its unique context, embodying the neighborhood character of Yorkville, the bustling commercial life of Bloor Street and the local heritage of Yonge Street.
This article was originally published by Common Edge as "Jan Gehl on Why Tall Buildings Aren’t Necessarily Bad for Street Life."
Jan Gehl, the great Danish urbanist, has much in common with Jane Jacobs. For the better part of a half-century now, his focus has been on the development of people-oriented cities. The author of a number of books, including Life Between Buildings, Cities for People, Public Spaces—Public Life, and most recently, How to Study Public Life, Gehl and his colleagues have also served as consultants for the cities of Copenhagen, London, Melbourne, Sydney, New York and Moscow. Gehl Architects currently has offices in Copenhagen, New York and San Francisco. I spoke to Gehl about Jacobs, the folly of modernist city planning, and New York City’s durable urban form.
Henning Larsen Architects, in collaboration with landscape architects SLA and BuroHappold Engineering, has been selected as the winners of an international design competition to design a new iconic skyscraper for the city of Manila, Philippines. Located within the Bonifacio Global City business district, “ICONE” tower rises from a large public plaza as a dramatic spire, piercing the sky and becoming a new icon for the Manila Skyline.
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Downtown Los Angeles’ skyscraper boom continues – this time straying south to the intersection of South Olive and 11th Street, where developer Crescent Heights has submitted plans for a new 70-story residential tower housing 794 apartment units. Designed by ODA, 1045 Olive is planned to top out at a height of 770 feet, which would make it Los Angeles’ tallest residential building and 4th tallest overall.
Unique to the structure (and fitting for Los Angeles) would be the massive amount of space dedicated to parking: 13.5 total floors would be dedicated to parking spots, including an above ground 8-story core that would be wrapped in apartments to visually conceal the cars within.
As reports have emerged that San Francisco’s infamous sinking skyscraper, the Millennium Tower, is continuing to settle downward, engineers from LERA and DeSimone Consulting have unveiled a potential fix for the building’s woes.
Since construction began in 2005, the 58-story luxury condominium tower has sank approximately 17 inches downward and while leaning 14 inches to the North. And according to a new report from Arup Ground, the issue doesn’t appear to be resolving itself anytime soon: in the past 7 months alone, the building has sunk an additional inch and tilted a further two inches, causing cracking in the building to worsen.
Triggered to action, developer Millennium Partners brought in LERA and DeSimone to devise a solution that would return the building to its original siting and secure it against sinking, all while allowing the building to continue operating through the repair process.
The SHoP-designed 111 West 57th Street, “the world’s skinniest skyscraper,” is at risk of never being completed due to soaring construction costs, the New York Post has reported. With fewer than 20 of the supertall skyscraper’s 82 stories currently constructed, a lawsuit filed by investment group AmBase is claiming the project is already $50 million over budget due in part to “egregious oversights” including neglecting to factor in the cost of construction cranes.
Currently under construction, new renderings of SkyRise Miami have been released, showcasing the 1,000-foot tower’s numerous mixed-use entertainment facilities from its prime location at the heart of Miami’s downtown core. Designed by local heavyweight Arquitectonica, the city’s tallest tower is being developed by Berkowitz Development Group, since the project’s inception in 2013.
In this video, British YouTuber Tom Scott explores Thyssenkrupp’s potentially disruptive new "MULTI" elevator system,” which the company revealed in detail this week. Though only in its beta stage of development, being tested within the confines of ThyssenKrupp’s 246-meter tall “innovation” tower in Rottweil, Germany, Multi aims to transform high rise building design with horizontally moving elevator cabs.
The German firm’s cable-free system utilizes vertically mounted tracks, in-cab braking systems, and pivoting elevator tracks to whisk occupants up and across buildings faster and safer than traditional shaft based systems.
In their latest press release, elevator manufacturer ThyssenKrupp announced new information about their cable-free system that rethinks the movement of the 1853 invention. Allowing for both horizontal and vertical transportation, “MULTI” has the capacity to innovate tall building design through its elimination of architectural constraints such as vertical alignment and elevator shaft dimensions. First unveiled as a concept in 2014, MULTI reported this month that the elevator has been installed into a test building and is soon to be implemented publicly into new developments.
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Los Angeles’ newest skyscraper, the Wilshire Grand Center, opened to the public this weekend, earning the crown of the United States’ tallest building west of the Mississippi River. Topping out at 1,100 feet, the building eclipses the nearby U.S. Bank Tower by about 82 feet, thanks to its glass crown and decorative spire that rise from above the 73rd floor.
Designed by AC Martin Partners, the structure also represents a major change in Los Angeles tall building design as the first skyscraper completed since the city’s 2014 decision to remove the stipulation that all buildings over 75 feet must feature a flat roof to serve as a helipad.
Renderings have been revealed for a new 832-foot-tall skyscraper that will rise from a current vacant lot on Chicago’s historic Michigan Avenue. Known as 1000M, the tower has been designed by JAHN, the practice helmed by one of Chicago’s most prolific architects, Helmut Jahn. The 74-story building will feature a blue-green glass curtain wall subdivided with metal horizontal spandrel panels, and a metallic mesh crown hovering over a rooftop terrace.
Goettsch Partners has been announced as the winners of an international competition for the design of the new Optics Valley Center complex in Wuhan, China. Being developed by prominent developer Greenland Group, the project will consist of 3.4 million square feet (315,000 square meters) of mixed-use space across three buildings, including a landmark 1,312-foot-tall (400-meter-tall) office tower that will “symbolize the future vision of Wuhan as the perfect balance between modern development and the environment.”
There’s a lot that the presence of skyscrapers can say about a city. They can be indicators of anything from wealth to modernization to density, or a combination of all three, depending on where you look. This potential to observe trends in a city through the height of its buildings makes data on those buildings valuable to a multitude of industries, so companies like Emporis conduct and distribute research on topics like the newest, tallest, and most expensive buildings in the world. Keep reading to find out about the ten tall cities that are home to the largest number of skyscrapers—as defined by Emporis' definition of a building that is 100 meters or more.
We all know that the skyscraper was born between Chicago and New York (depending on who you ask or what you consider a skyscraper, but that's for another discussion). But what about the rest of the US? How does each state stack up in the race towards the sky? This infographic by highrises.com gives us a scaled approximation of the "height" of each state--with New York coming out on top and Vermont, well... Vermont's tallest building is an 11-story public housing project built in the 70s.
The infographic also breaks down the purposes of the surveyed buildings, revealing that nearly 2% of the tallest buildings in each state are churches! Another interesting factoid? Nearly 1/3 of these highrises are named after banks.
eVolo Magazine has announced the winners of its 2017 Skyscraper Competition. Now in its 12th year, the annual award was established to recognize “visionary ideas for building [high-rise] projects that through [the] novel use of technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, challenge the way we understand vertical architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.”
This year, 3 winners and 22 honorable mentions were selected from a pool of 444 entries. Among this year’s winners are a modular educational center and marketplace for sub-Saharan Africa, a vertical stack of factory and recreational space, villages embedded in mountains and even a skyscraper built within a giant sequoia.
Florian W. Mueller's Singularity series is, in the photographer's own words, "just the building – reduced to the max." These deceptively simple shots of the summits of skyscrapers from around Europe and North America, each set against in infinite gradient of sky, are symbols of architecture's effort to reach ever higher in evermore unique ways. For Mueller, who is based in Cologne, they are an attempt at abstraction. In isolation—and especially when viewed together—they are remarkably revealing as studies of form and façade.
Have you been experiencing motion sickness, depression, sleepiness, and even fear, as you gaze out of your window from the 44th floor? If so, you may be prone to “Sick Building Syndrome” – the informal term for side effects caused by swaying skyscrapers, according to experts at the Universities of Bath and Exeter, who are launching a £7 million ($8.6 million) study into their causes and prevention through testing simulations.
“More and more people are living and working in high-rises and office blocks, but the true impact of vibrations on them is currently very poorly understood,” explained Alex Pavic, Professor of Vibration Engineering at the University of Exeter. “It will for the first time link structural motion, environmental conditions, and human body motion, psychology, and physiology in a fully controllable virtual environment.”
