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

Ok We Built It, Now How Does it Work?

Architecture has come a long way since 1885, when William Le Baron Jenney built what is widely considered the world’s first skyscraper. His eight-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago was designed with metal columns and beams instead of heavy masonry, leading the way for even taller constructions to come. In January 2010, SOM’s Burj Khalifa smashed the world record for tallest skyscraper in the world. The smooth steel stalagmite towers half a mile above Dubai, with its very tip often obscured by clouds.

These days, the claim of being the tallest building in the world is never held for too long. With skyscrapers going up at seemingly breakneck speeds, one would think that things have changed dramatically since Jenney’s architectural revolution in Chicago, and there is no doubt that they have. But Kate Ascher exposes the inner workings of these modern marvels in her new book The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper, and it turns out that contemporary design solutions are sometimes more primitive than one would think. She sat down with Fresh Air host Terry Gross to answer a few questions, for instance, what happens when you flush a toilet on the top of the tallest building in the world? Click to learn more.

What Ascher immediately assured NPR listeners was that even after digging for dirt on these unbelievable feats of engineering, she feels safe taking the elevator to a triple-digit floor. But she does provide some intriguing food for thought for our next trip to an observation deck. For one, she told Gross that engineers purposefully design buildings to sway back and forth in order to alleviate pressure caused by wind currents. Even more jarring is the fact that there is no precise formula behind the amount of sway in a building but only a maximum fraction of the building that is permitted to sway (one-500^th).

An excerpt from The Heights, via NPR.

She also explained how some skyscrapers are designed with large pools of water or some other material stored at the top of the building. These high-altitude tanks, called tuned liquid dampers, work to counter the sway from strong wind currents, functioning under basic laws of physics: when wind comes from one direction, the water will subsequently rush back in the other direction, working to keep the building in place.

As for the toilets thousands of feet in the air, we were told that flushing a toilet from the top of a skyscraper is not too different from flushing a toilet in a house. Water from toilets one or 100 floors above ground run into a septic system usually plugged into the city sewer systems, with the only real difference being the need for sophisticated twists and bends in the plumbing inside tall buildings to prevent waste from accelerating at terrifying speeds.

The most surprising fact was that despite the Burj Khalifa’s sophisticated design, the ultra modern high-rise is plugged into a city that has relatively outdated sewage infrastructure. Ascher remarked that for a number of Dubai’s skyscrapers, wastewater doesn’t deposit directly into the city sewer system. Instead, it gets trucked out to treatment plants and placed on a queue for sometimes up to 24 hours. The same goes for tall buildings in India and presumably other countries. Though Ascher foresees these countries investing in a more comprehensive, interconnected sewage system, right now it’s quite a paradox imagining a half-mile tall building requiring a half-mile long queue of wastewater-carrying trucks.
Source: Architizer Blog

Saudi Royal Family plans mile-high building

The Saudi Royal family today unveiled plans to construct the world’s tallest building – which will be an incredible one MILE high.

Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia will be 1.6km tall (one mile) when it is completed and consist of hotels, offices, luxury apartments and a shopping center.

The structure will be twice the height of the world’s current tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and FIVE times as tall as Britain’s highest building, The Shard.

It will take a staggering 12 minutes to reach the top of the £12 billion building in the escalator.

The mega structure will boast a staggering 12 million cubic square feet of interior space – 12 times more than Number One Canada Water in London’s Canary Wharf.

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Mies won’t shed a tear

This is a Mies van der Rohe building…?  It is.  Located in Chicago at the corner of 35th and Federal Streets, not far from several of his famous steel and glass skyscrapers…

The Test Cell

Take a last look.  The building nicknamed the Test Cell for its World War II usage as a test site for explosives is slated for demolition.  In it’s place, a new Metra Station.  Read more.