January 2023 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Behold: 111 West 57th Street — no name yet, but I would call it The Last Gasp Tower. 57th Street itself has come to be called Billionaire’s Row in this age of degenerate financialization that has enabled supernaturally huge fortunes to accrue via a combination of epic asset-stripping and capital market fuckery. Now of course, we’re at the end of the road for all that. And, readers have learned here, societies facing collapse paradoxically produce their most extravagant architectural monuments just before they founder.

At 1,428 feet high, this one’s only the second tallest residential building in the western hemisphere — the older Central Park Tower up the street beats it at 1,550 feet — but Last Gasp is at least the world’s skinniest tall residential building. The designers, SHoP Architects (exterior) and Studio Sofield (everything else) put the building on a keto diet with intermittent fasting. Pets are allowed and it’s close to shopping.

it’s understood in the annals of psychology that some human personalities delight in feelings of danger. They climb up sheer-faced rock walls without safety ropes,  jump out of airplanes, crawl into the deepest hidden recesses of underground caverns, surf on fifty-foot Atlantic rollers…. But these are a very small percent of the population. Think you could sleep in one of these upper-story apartments on a windy night — which, at that altitude, would be most nights? Now, imagine on the floor above you the intoxicated wife of a Kuwaiti sheik expires of a Xanax overdose in her gold-plated bathtub with the water running…. Oh, the humanity…!

Thanks to Neil Rollinson for the nomination.