The rise and rise and rise of the supertall skyscraper
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.”1
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And yet some motion is safe and normal, and often goes unnoticed. In fact, evolving approaches to handling high winds are a big reason contemporary supertalls have gotten to be so numerous, and so thin.2
Developers know they cannot control the wind. What they can do—and this is an industry term—is confuse it. For this, they recruit a wind-whisperer like Derek Kelly. Kelly, an engineer with the consulting firm RWDI, is a garrulous Canadian who, when I asked about superslims, told me the company has worked on “almost every building you see out your window.”
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- 1. 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).
- 2. Tall buildings get celebrated as gravity-defying, but it’s their defiance of the wind that should inspire awe. Imagine a strong wind blowing south over Central Park. The wind hits the supertall and pushes it backwards into a lean, then causes the structure to sway as the gust picks up and dies down. Wind can get stronger at higher altitudes and intensify as it whips off neighboring high-rises, so what registers as a gentle breeze on the fifth floor may give way to howling on the 45th. Wind barreling around the supertall creates turbulent eddies on the building’s exterior that cause the structure to wag from side to side. These are the accelerations that tenants are most likely to perceive, and slender supertalls are even more susceptible to them.
