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You may think that once you’ve figured out how to keep the building upright and made it stiff enough to live in without a daily Dramamine, getting the elevators and plumbing right would be easy.
Von Klemperer says he has never seen the kinds of floods and elevator outages the Times documented at 432 Park Avenue, but “it’s the kind of thing you’re warned might happen if you don’t get the design right.”
However they’re designed, though, tall buildings shimmy a bit, a situation that is usually neither dangerous nor uncomfortable, and in theory, the internal systems, such as elevators, plumbing, and utilities, should tolerate that motion. If residents see it sloshing around, they freak out.”Īrchitects Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill, designers of the 1,550-foot-high Central Park Tower on West 57th Street, used the customary wind-tunnel studies to shape the building so it would remain serene even in hurricane-force blasts. “That’s mainly because of the water in a toilet bowl. “The standards for tolerance are tighter in a residential building than in an office building,” says von Klemperer. The sort of slender, reedlike condo building designed for the few, the foreign, and the filthy rich has to work that much harder to stand firm, like a ballerina remaining en pointe in a gale.
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Even a bulky office tower planted on a full city block - like, say, the John Hancock Tower in Chicago - can creak and shift on a blustery night. “You don’t have repeatable results because the shape of the building changes the performance.”Īll skyscrapers face a common foe: wind. “Once you get over 40 stories, every one of these towers is a prototype,” Edgett says. It’s also true that the architecture of tall buildings is an evolving field. Developers are widely unfamiliar with the concept of mistakes, architects don’t want to talk about what can’t or shouldn’t be done, and few high-rise engineers want to talk themselves out of the next big job. As long as problems don’t crop up before they unload the property, they can do whatever they want.”Ĭonsensus on these issues, at least the on-the-record kind, is hard to come by. The people who put up the buildings are not accountable for their quality. The problem is not confined to tall buildings, says a well-known structural engineer who asked to remain anonymous so his career wouldn’t spontaneously combust: “It’s the way development operates in New York. It’s the fulfillment of the kind of scary situation you’re warned about.”Ībsolutely, says Steven Edgett, an elevator specialist and the president of the California-based Edgett Williams Consulting Group: “As soon as I saw the core of 432 Park, alarm bells went off.” The elevator shafts are too tight, he says, making breakdowns a foregone conclusion. Not at all, says James von Klemperer, president of the architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox, which plants skyscrapers all over the world: “In a building that thin, this kind of thing can happen, but it shouldn’t. When the New York Times published its searching, empathetic investigation into the struggles of the ultrarich as they battle floods, economic assault, and one another in their leaky spindle building at 432 Park Avenue, the focus was on the residents’ specific suffering: the tragic fact, for instance, that, when the troubles began, “breakfast was no longer free.” But the article raised questions about the engineering of supertall, super-skinny apartment buildings: Do they have to sway? Must the wind whistle through the vents? Will elevator cables unavoidably slap and cabs go out of service? Does the plumbing predictably rebel, creating a 1,000-foot cascade inside the central utility shaft? Are these interruptions of the good life a necessary condition of the high life?
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