How Tall Is Too Tall?
Photographs By Jeffrey Milstein
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It was a sunny day in New York City when I realized that my sky was being stolen.
The first sign of trouble was the crane. Its thin finger appeared over the old brick building outside my window, scratching at the sliver of sky I could just make out above the rooftops. My sky. In a city where you can sprain your neck searching for sky, I relished this shard of blue, so tiny that I could cover it with my thumb.
I consoled myself about the crane with the flimsy logic I once used after discovering a bedbug: It’ll go away!
It didn’t.
When the metal skeleton of a skyscraper materialized beneath the crane, I told myself that the new building would top out soon. It couldn’t possibly get much taller.
But the skeleton kept stretching. It rose above the brick building, then over the windows of neighboring apartments, walling off precious blue behind it. It was so tall, so thin, I began to doubt that the cross-hatching of metal beams could actually be a building.
We’re living through the birth of a new species of skyscraper that not even architects and engineers saw coming. After 9/11, experts concluded that skyscrapers were finished. Tall buildings that were in the works got scaled down or canceled on the assumption that soaring towers were too risky to be built or occupied. “There were all sorts of symposiums and public statements that we’re never going to build tall again,” one former architect told The Guardian in 2021. “All we’ve done in the 20 years since is build even taller.”
There are skyscrapers, and then there are supertalls, often defined as buildings more than 300 meters in height, but better known as the cloud-puncturing sci-fi towers that look like digital renderings, even when you’re staring at them from the sidewalk. First supertalls were impossible, then a rarity. Now they’re all over the place. In 2019 alone, developers added more supertalls than had existed prior to the year 2000; there are now a couple hundred worldwide, including Dubai’s 163-story Burj Khalifa (a hypodermic needle aimed at space), Tianjin’s 97-floor CTF Finance Centre (reminiscent of a drill bit boring the clouds), and, encroaching on my sky, Manhattan’s 84-floor Steinway Tower (a luxury condominium resembling the love child of a dustbuster and a Mach3 razor).
Some supertalls have an even more futuristic designation: . These buildings are alternately described as “needle towers” or “toothpick skyscrapers” (though not every superslim is a supertall). Early superslims shot up in Hong Kong in the 1970s, though lately they’ve become synonymous with New York City; four supertall superslims loom over the southern end of Central Park in a stretch of Midtown dubbed “Billionaires’ Row.” Building engineers, like judgy modeling agents, have varying definitions of , but they usually agree that such buildings must have a height-to-width ratio of at least 10 to 1. To put that in perspective, the Empire State Building (one of the world’s first supertalls, completed in 1931) is about three times taller than it is wide—“pudgy,” as one engineer described it to me. Steinway Tower is. (The developer’s official name for the building is 111 West 57th Street.) These superslim buildings—and supertalls generally—have relied on engineering breakthroughs to combat the perilous physics that go with height. A 2021 article in the journal declared: “There is no doubt that super-tall, slender buildings are the most technologically advanced constructions in the world.”
