Advertisement
International Property
OpinionComment
David Dodwell
David Dodwell

Outside In | Unlike in New York, Hong Kong’s high-rise living has helped its communities thrive

  • Building vertically was, in reality, Hong Kong’s only option due to the geology and climate, but the city has made the best of it
  • Creating communities around MTR stations has strengthened rather than weakened community engagement and helped bind us together

Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
4
High-rise buildings in Kowloon on July 16, 2020. Hong Kong has for decades been more densely populated with supertall buildings than any other city. Photo: Sun Yeung
David Dodwell

A fuss over the latest super-tall tower to pierce the sky above New York’s Central Park has got me thinking about the neighbourhood-destroying potential of high-rise buildings and how Hong Kong’s community-wide adoption of vertical living is distinct and perhaps not as harmful.

This most recent kerfuffle is over Steinway Tower on 111 West 57th Street, the newest glass sliver to rise 435 metres above Billionaire’s Row along the southern end of Central Park. It has surpassed Hong Kong’s 75-storey Highcliff on Stubbs Road to claim the title of the world’s skinniest building. Steinway Tower is indeed a monument to brilliant modern engineering, but it is also a dubious addition to the neighbourhood it now looms over.

Edwin Heathcote, long-standing architecture and design critic for the Financial Times, last week called Steinway Tower “a deposit of unimaginable wealth in the sky” that is divorced from the life of the city below. “Its ethereal profile makes it the purest illustration of architecture as an expression of surplus capital,” he said – not a home but a luxury good, “more like a land-bound yacht”.

The tower is the latest of a series of seven supertall residential buildings – including One57, Central Park Tower, Central Park South and 432 Park Avenue – that now cast their long shadows over the park. Critics have dubbed them “safe-deposit boxes in the sky”.
These flats are not built for New Yorkers. They are built exclusively for the often-absent super-rich, selling for up to US$66 million and bought through offshore entities intended to disguise ownership. They are designed for the well-heeled to avoid “the possibility of accidental encounter with a neighbour or an ordinary citizen”.

02:25

Miami to get world’s first ‘Covid-ready’ skyscraper

Miami to get world’s first ‘Covid-ready’ skyscraper

Despite its height and cost, Steinway Tower has just 60 condominiums. As Samuel Stein at the City University of New York recently noted: “The problem with super-thin high-rises is not their size per se. It’s that so few people live in them … Instead of 60 gigantic condos, this building could fit 442 normal-sized apartments.”

Advertisement