MINIATURE SKYSCRAPERS
Miniature skyscrapers have the svelte proportions of a true skyscraper but are not very tall. This is because they have small footprints.
Therefore they are appropriate for any fine-grained context of small buildings. They are out of scale on the brash grid of New York, where they are much too diminutive and would seem paltry. They slip suavely, however, into Lilliputian settings like Forest Hills or the Yale Campus. If they were allowed, they could also be at home in Greenwich Village, Charleston, Celebration or Poundbury.
The very most diminutive skyscraper I know of is the station hotel tower at Forest Hills, Queens, a transit suburb developed in the early years of the Twentieth Century.
Here, from your leafy, half-timbered mini-manor and a villagey downtown you can catch the subway or commuter train to Manhattan’s grown-up sized skyscrapers distantly visible from the elevated train platform. The context is Station Square, where the little woman will drop you off if you’re feeling too lazy to walk to the train:
Station Square, Forest Hills, Queens. They are now building similar transit towns in California; Peter Calthorpe is their czar.
Everyone knows Wright’s Price Tower in suburban Tulsa. It started life as mixed residential and commercial. They are about to turn it into a boutique hotel.
Look how dainty the scale is, and how diminutive the entrance. Too bad it’s not in an urban setting; with a little modification of the lower floors, it could be slipped into just about any street in Greenwich Village for a little visual relief:
Where little old Greenwich Village meets the Hudson, Richard Meier has just placed two fine-boned residential towers for the likes of Nicole Kidman:
Stacked movie stars, one per floor. Also on hand: Martha Stewart, Calvin Klein and the Olsen Twins. If you have just one unit per floor, you get back the efficiency that comes with having no corridors. It also helps if you can get ten million or so per unit.
Problem with miniature skyscrapers is that they are not efficient, and therefore not much loved by developers. They are most at home in settings where stratospheric returns per square foot offset the very high percentage of each floor plate occupied by elevators and the mandatory two fire stairs. Hence they make good boutique hotels and corporate headquarters, as well as apartments for movie stars.
NIMBYs hate them because they conflict with their pet theory, which is that height is the villain that causes buildings to be out of scale. This is usually just a misconception, though a widespread one. It is often enshrined in zoning, either out of ignorance or to placate the NIMBYs. As a pedestrian in touch with your own feelings, you know that it is really building footprint --the size of the increment of development-- that causes buildings to be out of scale, and height limitations actually encourage larger footprints and hence buildings that are out of scale.
A one-story supermarket is grotesque in an urban setting if it takes up a block, and even more so if it comes with a parking lot. This is lost on NIMBYs, who are addicted to theories. It’s hard to shake a theory in which people have invested emotional energy.
Yale has an entire collection of miniature skyscrapers. The Hall of Graduate Studies houses offices and classrooms:
The Biology Tower is by Philip Johnson:
The gymnasium tower looms over a picturesque medieval street brought to you by Eero Saarinen:
And Saarinen himself contributes a tower of student dorm rooms:
In Boston, Beacon Hill has a miniature skyscraper that nobody notices, on Beacon Street just up the hill from Charles Street:
You will also find one on the north side of Commonwealth Avenue, right in the tenderloin of Back Bay; there should be one in Harvard Square, but everyone there confuses scale with height. Finally, there is everybody’s favorite, the Custom House, now a luxury hotel. Who in his right mind would say this building is out of scale, regardless of where you put it?
The Nebraska State Capitol is a corporate headquarters of sorts:
And the midget Granite Trust Company lords it over Quincy’s main street like Napoleon marshalling his troops:
Finally, at the very top end of the size spectrum, here is a giant miniature skyscraper built in Antwerp in 1930 and long the tallest office building in Europe:
In a rational world most any one of these cutie-pies could be placed without further nimbification. It does take a willingness, however, to recognize that out-of-scale buildings are the ones that ooze and sprawl all over the landscape, not necessarily the ones with vertical proportions. Keep the footprint small, NIMBYs, and everything will be OK.
Finally as a postscript, here is a whole city full of miniature skyscrapers. They are built of mud and represent at one and the same time two limits: the limit to how high you can build in unreinforced mud brick (note the one on the right that has collapsed), and the limit of how high you could get someone to climb stairs in pre-technological times:
Shibam, Yemen
Miniature skyscrapers have the svelte proportions of a true skyscraper but are not very tall. This is because they have small footprints.
Therefore they are appropriate for any fine-grained context of small buildings. They are out of scale on the brash grid of New York, where they are much too diminutive and would seem paltry. They slip suavely, however, into Lilliputian settings like Forest Hills or the Yale Campus. If they were allowed, they could also be at home in Greenwich Village, Charleston, Celebration or Poundbury.
The very most diminutive skyscraper I know of is the station hotel tower at Forest Hills, Queens, a transit suburb developed in the early years of the Twentieth Century.
Here, from your leafy, half-timbered mini-manor and a villagey downtown you can catch the subway or commuter train to Manhattan’s grown-up sized skyscrapers distantly visible from the elevated train platform. The context is Station Square, where the little woman will drop you off if you’re feeling too lazy to walk to the train:
Station Square, Forest Hills, Queens. They are now building similar transit towns in California; Peter Calthorpe is their czar.
Everyone knows Wright’s Price Tower in suburban Tulsa. It started life as mixed residential and commercial. They are about to turn it into a boutique hotel.
Look how dainty the scale is, and how diminutive the entrance. Too bad it’s not in an urban setting; with a little modification of the lower floors, it could be slipped into just about any street in Greenwich Village for a little visual relief:
Where little old Greenwich Village meets the Hudson, Richard Meier has just placed two fine-boned residential towers for the likes of Nicole Kidman:
Stacked movie stars, one per floor. Also on hand: Martha Stewart, Calvin Klein and the Olsen Twins. If you have just one unit per floor, you get back the efficiency that comes with having no corridors. It also helps if you can get ten million or so per unit.
Problem with miniature skyscrapers is that they are not efficient, and therefore not much loved by developers. They are most at home in settings where stratospheric returns per square foot offset the very high percentage of each floor plate occupied by elevators and the mandatory two fire stairs. Hence they make good boutique hotels and corporate headquarters, as well as apartments for movie stars.
NIMBYs hate them because they conflict with their pet theory, which is that height is the villain that causes buildings to be out of scale. This is usually just a misconception, though a widespread one. It is often enshrined in zoning, either out of ignorance or to placate the NIMBYs. As a pedestrian in touch with your own feelings, you know that it is really building footprint --the size of the increment of development-- that causes buildings to be out of scale, and height limitations actually encourage larger footprints and hence buildings that are out of scale.
A one-story supermarket is grotesque in an urban setting if it takes up a block, and even more so if it comes with a parking lot. This is lost on NIMBYs, who are addicted to theories. It’s hard to shake a theory in which people have invested emotional energy.
Yale has an entire collection of miniature skyscrapers. The Hall of Graduate Studies houses offices and classrooms:
The Biology Tower is by Philip Johnson:
The gymnasium tower looms over a picturesque medieval street brought to you by Eero Saarinen:
And Saarinen himself contributes a tower of student dorm rooms:
In Boston, Beacon Hill has a miniature skyscraper that nobody notices, on Beacon Street just up the hill from Charles Street:
You will also find one on the north side of Commonwealth Avenue, right in the tenderloin of Back Bay; there should be one in Harvard Square, but everyone there confuses scale with height. Finally, there is everybody’s favorite, the Custom House, now a luxury hotel. Who in his right mind would say this building is out of scale, regardless of where you put it?
The Nebraska State Capitol is a corporate headquarters of sorts:
And the midget Granite Trust Company lords it over Quincy’s main street like Napoleon marshalling his troops:
Finally, at the very top end of the size spectrum, here is a giant miniature skyscraper built in Antwerp in 1930 and long the tallest office building in Europe:
In a rational world most any one of these cutie-pies could be placed without further nimbification. It does take a willingness, however, to recognize that out-of-scale buildings are the ones that ooze and sprawl all over the landscape, not necessarily the ones with vertical proportions. Keep the footprint small, NIMBYs, and everything will be OK.
Finally as a postscript, here is a whole city full of miniature skyscrapers. They are built of mud and represent at one and the same time two limits: the limit to how high you can build in unreinforced mud brick (note the one on the right that has collapsed), and the limit of how high you could get someone to climb stairs in pre-technological times:
Shibam, Yemen
