Super-tall tower could replace former home of lowly bar

World Wide Group is selling six buildings across the street from Bloomingdale’s. The new owner can raze the properties and build a 1,000-foot-tall residential tower.

Super tall tower – An ultra-pricey, tall residential tower could soon sprout across the street from Bloomingdale’s.

Real estate investment firm World Wide Group has put a collection of six, low-rise buildings near the corner of East 60th Street and Lexington Avenue on the market for sale. One of the properties was the longtime home of famed dive bar Subway Inn, which recently relocated. The site can accommodate a roughly 280,000-square-foot tower that could potentially rise as high as 1,000 feet. If a developer opts to include affordable housing, the square footage and height of the building would be permitted to increase by up to 20% more.

World Wide purchased the buildings one by one during the past decade. It has hired a team from Cushman & Wakefield—led by Bob Knakal, Cushman’s chairman of New York investment sales, and brokers Clint Olsen and Helen Hwang—to handle the deal. The site could be worth $300 million or more, a price that would make it one of the city’s most expensive ever sold per square foot.

Spanning six contiguous buildings from 143 E. 60th St. to 161 E. 60th St., the development site is across the street from Bloomingdale’s flagship department store and near a bustling shopping corridor on Lexington Avenue. Part of the site’s value is the 200 feet of frontage along East 60th Street that would allow a builder to create significant retail space.

If a tower is erected on the site, it would be one of few to reach the heavens on the far east side of midtown. Several 1,000-foot-plus developments are already underway farther west, just south of Central Park.

The site sale is one of the latest large assignments that is being handled by Mr. Knakal since he sold the brokerage firm he co-founded, Massey Knakal, to Cushman earlier this year. Mr. Knakal was tapped to handle the sale of 1 Court Square, the soaring office building in Long Island City, Queens, that is asking more than $500 million.

By Daniel Geiger

Photo: PropertyShark.com

In China, an underground luxury hotel

While many architects and engineers have been vying to construct the world’s tallest tower, a group in China has looked to build in the opposite direction.

Construction began last month on Shanghai’s first “groundscraper”—a structure built almost completely below the surface. The massive project will eventually take form as the InterContinental Shimao Shanghai Wonderland, a 19-story, 380-room luxury hotel surrounded by a 428,000 square-meter theme park.

The hotel broke ground about 30 miles from the city of Shanghai in an abandoned quarry at the foot of Tianmashan Mountain. The building, located in the district of Songjiang, will be grafted onto the side of the quarry with 16 floors descending down and three floors resting above the crater.

Just as the top levels of a skyscraper are often filled with elegant restaurants and the most luxurious of rooms, the bottom two floors of the groundscraper will include an underwater restaurant, an athletic complex for water sports and 10-meter deep aquarium.

The quarry’s surrounding cliffs will be used for extreme sports like bungee jumping and rock climbing.

The project’s developers at the Shimao Property Group worked with British engineering firm Atkins to bring the idea to fruition and expect to near completion in late 2014 or early 2015.

The theme park and hotel are expected to cost at least $555 million and nightly room rates should start at approximately $320.

Existing quarry

Source

Saudi Arabia plans world’s tallest tower

Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s investment vehicle, Kingdom Holding, has announced that an associate company will partner with the country’s Bin Laden Group to build a tower near Jeddah that would replace Dubai’s 828m Burj Khalifa as the world’s tallest building.

The associate company, Jeddah Economic Co, signed the SR4.6bn ($1.23bn) contract with the Bin Laden Group, a construction company, that will also own a 16.63 per cent stake in the company. Kingdom Co will hold 33.35 per cent.

The 1km-tall building will include a Four Seasons hotel and apartments, luxury condominiums and offices. The tower is the first phase of the 5.3m square metre Kingdom City development to be built north of the Red Sea city of Jeddah, according to a statement on the Saudi bourse, Tadawul.

Construction is due to start shortly and is expected to take just over five years. The design was inspired by a desert plant.

The SR100bn Kingdom City development was unveiled shortly after the global financial crisis in 2008. Analysts then raised doubts over Kingdom Holding’s ability to generate funding or investors’ interest amid a global real estate crisis.  

Last year Kingdom signed up US-based Adrian Smith & Gordon Gill Architecture to design the building. The company’s previous projects include the Burj Khalifa, the Mao Tower in Shanghai and Pearl River Tower in Guangzhou.

Kingdom Holding posted a 21 per cent rise in second-quarter net profit, buoyed by higher income from its global investments. Jeddah Economic Co’s capital is made up of SR8.8bn in land, SR7.3bn in other assets and SR1.5bn in cash.

Started in 1979, Kingdom has evolved from a real estate and construction business into a diversified holding company with a broad range of assets from media to banking and hotels.

Prince Alwaleed, a nephew of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, controls 95 per cent of Kingdom Holding. With a net worth of nearly $20bn, he is the richest Arab businessman. His investments include substantial stakes in News Corp, Citigroup and Apple, as well as several luxury hotels.

Source: The Financial Times

Winners of the 2011 Skyscraper Competition

eVolo magazine has run a tidy little competition for the last five years, inviting architects to innovative new skyscraper typologies. Today, the winners of the 2011 Skyscraper Competition were announced and we’ve got a recycling wind turbine, an energy- and water-harvesting horizontal tower, and a re-imagining of the Hoover Dam.

Jury members included SOFTlab principals Jose Gonzalez and Michael Svizos, architecture critic John Hill, Mitchell Joachim of Terreform One, CarloMaria Ciampoli of Live Architecture Network, and a host of other working and teaching architects (see the full list here).

FIRST PLACE: ‘LO2P Recycling Skyscraper’ by Atelier CMJN (Julien Combes, Gaël Brulé)

“The idea behind this skyscraper is to recycle the old cars and use them as building material for the new structure. The building is designed as a giant lung that would clean New Delhi’s air through a series of large-scale greenhouses that serve as filters. Another set of rotating filters capture the suspended particles in the air while the waste heat and carbon dioxide from the recycling center are used to grow plants that in turn produce bio-fuels.”

“The idea behind this skyscraper is to recycle the old cars and use them as building material for the new structure. The building is designed as a giant lung that would clean New Delhi’s air through a series of large-scale greenhouses that serve as filters. Another set of rotating filters capture the suspended particles in the air while the waste heat and carbon dioxide from the recycling center are used to grow plants that in turn produce bio-fuels.”

SECOND PLACE: ‘Flat Tower’ by Yoann Mescam, Paul-Eric Schirr-Bonnans, and Xavier Schirr-Bonnans

Imagined for medium-size cities where vertical skyscrapers do not fit the skyline, the flat tower is a “new high-density typology that deviates from the traditional skyscraper. The medium-height dome structure is perforated with cell-like skylights that provide direct sunlight to the agricultural fields and to the interior spaces. The dome’s large surface area is perfect to harvest solar energy and rainwater collection.”

THIRD PLACE: ‘Reimagining the Hoover Dam’ by Yheu-Shen Chua, United Kingdom

This project merges the programs at the current Hoover Dam — viewing platform, a bridge, and a gallery – into a “single vertical super structure.”

There a long list of honorable mentions, and we’ve highlighted below some especial favorites (clockwise from top left):

‘Sports Tower’ by Sergiy Prokofyev and Olga Prokofyeva, Ukraine

‘RE:pH Coastscraper’ by Gary Kellett, United Kingdom

‘White Cloud Skyscraper‘ by Adrian Vincent Kumar and Yun Kong Sung, New Zealand

‘Seeds of Life Skyscraper’ by Mekano (Osama Mohamed Elghannam, Karim Mohamed Elnabawy, Mohamed Ahmed Khamis, Nesma Mohamed Abobakr), Egypt

‘Waste Collector Skyscraper’ by Agata Sander and Tomek Kujawski, Poland

‘Hopetel: Transitional High-Rise Housing’ by Asaf Dali, United States

Via Architizer.com