“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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