“When I hit 13, I went to high school downtown,” Palumbo says. From a corner near his house, he would gaze at the John Hancock tower, the matt-black, tapering monolith near the lakeshore, and dream big. Less desirable council towers are reaching the end of their habitable lives, facing decay, demolition or expensive repair.Ĭhicago born and raised, Mike Palumbo is a Bulls fan who grew up on the edge of the city, the son of a truck parts salesman. Now social tenants of the Grade II*-listed building, and its sister, Balfron Tower in east London, are being displaced by upwards gentrification. It was originally entirely owned by the Greater London Council, and rented out as council flats. They frequently evoke dystopian imagery Ernö Goldfinger’s troubled Trellick Tower in west London, completed in 1972, is thought to have inspired JG Ballard’s dark thriller High-Rise. Skyscraping homes have always held an allure a house with a view, a life in the sky. I spoke to residents around the world, and many reported feeling uplifted by their elevated perspective, but there are hidden downsides: a Canadian study of heart attack victims showed survival rates dropped markedly on higher floors, because they were harder for paramedics to reach. At the top of a tower in east London, former taxi driver Sammy Dias rarely uses his balcony: “I don’t like heights, and if people go out and start messing about, I can get quite angry,” he says from a safe distance inside. “You could get tanned in winter if you sat right by the window: there’s a bit of a greenhouse effect,” the owner of a 64th-floor apartment above Chicago tells me. The payoff for peace and endless views can be five-minute waits for the lift at rush hour – and even sunburn. Sophisticated dampening systems at the tops of towers mean slender buildings can rise higher, on smaller urban plots, without toppling in a storm or swaying to the point of causing nausea.įor a growing number of city dwellers, day-to-day life can be a little different. ![]() Lifts can now travel at more than 40mph and climb for hundreds of metres, thanks to lightweight carbon fibre ropes. ![]() Jason Gabel, an urban planner at the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, which keeps a global skyscraper database, says advances in building technology partly explain the trend. Even in Bristol, where St Mary Redcliffe church has been unrivalled in its heavenwards reach for more than six centuries, there are plans for a 22-storey residential tower that would come close. In Manchester, the first 200m building outside the capital is due for completion next year. Skyscraper clusters are casting shadows across London. If skyscrapers broke ground as barometers of corporate hubris, increasingly they now stand for personal excess, applying gravity to the wealth divide.īritain, traditionally a low-rise country, is part of the boom. But today the highest residential towers are overwhelmingly luxury developments, and many remain empty, weeks after selling. Hundreds were built in the postwar social housing boom, in cities across Europe. What is life like up there? For decades, tower blocks typically comprised social or affordable housing in crowded cities or on new estates. Its highest apartments will be on the 156th floor. The Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, due to be completed in 2020, will be the first to break 1,000m. Mixed-use towers, with apartments as well as offices and hotels, include the Burj Khalifa, still the world’s tallest building, at 828m. Today, there are 255 residential towers above that height, with a further 184 under construction. ![]() In 2000, there were 215 office towers worldwide above 200m high (the first, the Metropolitan Life Tower in New York, was completed in 1909), but only three residential towers that high. Meanwhile in India, the 442m Mumbai World One will push higher still, its Armani-designed penthouses on level 117 offering airliner views of the Arabian Sea. Next year, the 426m Park Avenue tower will lose its title to 111 West 57th Street, rising two blocks to the west. Because to enjoy it in person would require knowing the unnamed owner of the 800 sq m penthouse at 432 Park Avenue – or buying it for more than the $88m (£71m) it sold for last year.īut there are alternatives for those with a head for heights and the money to match. This is the view from the world’s highest home, as enjoyed virtually, using Google Earth. Between them, the Statue of Liberty is almost lost in the haze. ![]() To the south, the Empire State Building pierces the city’s canopy of stone and iron, and the blue glass of the new World Trade Center glints beyond it. Below me, Central Park is laid out like a picnic blanket, its largest trees rendered shrub-like. M anhattan’s avenues stretch north like tracks through a forest, eventually disappearing into Harlem.
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