Impossible Builds: “The Skinny Skyscraper” (Blink Films, PBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

PBS’s next science program was from a short-lived (just four episodes from 2018) series called Impossible Builds, though the buildings it depicted were obviously not impossible – just extraordinarily difficult. This show was about the building currently under construction (nearing completion by the end of 2021, according to the Wikipedia page on it) at 111 West 57th Street in New York City, an 82-story tower of ultra-luxury apartments (the buy-in cost, according to the show’s commentary, is “up to $57 million”) on a small framework dictated by the rest of what’s on the block. The rest of what’s on the block is the legendary Steinway Hall, built by the piano company between 1916 and 1924, containing a concert space, piano showrooms and a lobby with an elaborately decorated ceiling. Both the whole building and the ceiling itself were declared historical landmarks by the City of New York, which meant that the developer of the 111 West 57th Street tower couldn’t just buy the whole block and tear the old hall down to make room for a big new building. A development company called JDS bought the property in 2012-2013 and planned to build a “skinny” tower on the site while also restoring Steinway Hall and shoring up its foundations.

The first problem was that the island of Manhattan is based on solid granite, which was one reason why it became the site of so many skyscrapers in the first place – the ultra-hard rock ground made it able to support the weight of ultra-tall buildings – but it posed a problem for JDS and their contractors: it was incredibly hard to dig it out to lay the foundation for a much larger building than the one already on the site. The new building was designed by Gregg Pasquarelli of a company called SHoP Architects, and Pasquarelli was one of the most engaging people interviewed for this show. He comes off as a surprisingly child-like man who still hasn’t got over the initial awe he felt as a child in New York City growing up as the original World Trade Center towers were being built in the early 1960’s. (They were destroyed, as all the world knows, by the al-Qaeda terror attacks on September 11, 2001.) In fact, he still has – and has kept complete – the Lego model of one of the towers he built as a kid.

The program followed the building project through various stages, including the actual pouring of the concrete for the bottom floor – a tricky process because any delays could result in cracks that would jeopardize the building’s structural integrity, and one which had to be completed in a day because they were doing it just before New York’s annual two-month moratorium on concrete foundation-laying during November, December and January. Another problem Pasquarelli and his fellow designers had was uncovered in wind-tunnel tests of a model of the structure: it literally swayed in the wind, meaning that those people who paid $57 million to live on its top floor would feel the building shake back and forth during New York’s notoriously high winds. They undertook several solutions, including leaving three floors of the building totally open, connected to the overall structure but with missing walls so the wind could flow through them without making the rest of the building sway, and an elaborate machine that looked like a pendulum attached to a giant mechanical crab to distribute the forces affecting the building more evenly and give it greater stability. There was also a brief scene about the hand-crafted fixtures in the apartments, made of brass and essentially hand-crafted by a company that’s been doing this sort of thing for over a century.

It’s a show that I had profoundly mixed feelings about: I enjoyed watching the suspense of the various engineering problems the contractors would encounter building such a tall and narrow structure, but at the same time the radical-socialist part of me couldn’t help but wonder why we’re celebrating the inventive construction of a handful of $57 million homes in a city in which hundreds of thousands of people are homeless. It’s an example of the Second Gilded Age we’re living in, when (thanks to deliberate and conscious policy choices on the part of corporate leaders, wealthy individuals and the politicians who depend on their financial support to get in office in the first place) inequalities of wealth and income are soaring to levels not seen in this country even in the First Gilded Age in the latter half of the 19th century. At a time when just three individual people – Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway – own as much as the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined, there’s an air of noblesse oblige about this project, of the rich once again sticking it to the not-so-rich and almost literally giving them the finger.