The tallest residential buildings
Central Park Tower on West 57th Street in Manhattan is the tallest building in the world that people live in. Four of the five tallest are within a few blocks of each other, and three of them are thinner than anything previously built that high.
The record, and the three behind it
Central Park Tower is 472 m (1549 ft) and 98 floors, finished in 2020. It is the tallest residential building anywhere and the second tallest building in the United States, behindOne World Trade Center. The Nordstrom store in its base is the reason the tower exists in that footprint at all.
111 West 57th Street, better known as Steinway Tower after the piano showroom it was built behind, is 435 m and 84 floors. At about 24 to 1, the ratio of its height to the width of its base makes it the most slender skyscraper in the world. A conventional office tower sits nearer 6 to 1. 432 Park Avenue is 426 m, 85 floors and a square tube 28 m on a side, which works out close to 15 to 1.
The ranking
| Building | Place | Year | Height | Floors | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Central Park Tower | New York, USA | 2020 | 472 m | 98 | |
| 111 West 57th Street | New York, USA | 2021 | 435 m | 84 | |
| 432 Park Avenue | New York, USA | 2015 | 426 m | 85 | |
| Marina 101 | Dubai, UAE | 2017 | 425 m | 101 | |
| Princess Tower | Dubai, UAE | 2012 | 413 m | 101 | |
| 23 Marina | Dubai, UAE | 2012 | 392 m | 89 | |
| Burj Mohammed Bin Rashid | Abu Dhabi, UAE | 2014 | 381 m | 88 | |
| Elite Residence | Dubai, UAE | 2012 | 381 m | 87 | |
| The Brooklyn Tower | New York, USA | 2022 | 325 m | 74 |
Dubai held this record for most of the 2010s. Princess Tower took it in 2012 at 413 m, Marina 101 passed it in 2017 at 425 m, and New York took it back when 432 Park Avenue and then Central Park Tower topped out. Note what the floor counts do: Marina 101 and Princess Tower each have 101 floors against Central Park Tower's 98, and both are shorter. Manhattan ceilings are higher and its mechanical floors are deeper.
The Brooklyn Tower
The Brooklyn Tower at 9 DeKalb Avenue is 325 m and the first supertall outside Manhattan. SHoP Architects wrapped it in black stainless steel and bronze and set it on the 1929 Dime Savings Bank, whose marble banking hall is now the lobby. It is the tallest building in Brooklyn by a wide margin and the tallest in New York City outside Manhattan.
How a pencil tower gets built
A pencil tower is a residential building whose height comes from a lot far too small for it. The lot is the starting condition, and two things turn it into a tower. The first is legal. New York zoning caps the floor area a lot may hold, but a developer can buy the unused allowance from neighboring owners and move it, so a row of low-rise buildings on 57th Street becomes height on one mid-block parcel. Steinway Tower assembled air rights from several neighbors, including the Russian Tea Room.
The second is structural. Concrete mixes above 100 MPa let a column carry the same load in a fraction of the area that 1970s concrete needed, so the core and the walls stop eating the apartment. Tuned mass dampers near the top absorb the motion the slim shape produces: 432 Park Avenue carries two of them, and Central Park Tower has one of roughly 800 tonnes. Open floors at intervals let wind pass through instead of pushing the whole shaft.
What slenderness costs
A narrow tower moves more than a wide one at the same height, and the people inside feel it. Sway is normal engineering, but at 15 or 24 to 1 the margin between safe and comfortable gets thin.
432 Park Avenue is the documented case. In September 2021 the building's condominium board sued the developers in New York Supreme Court, listing more than 1,500 claimed construction and design defects. The filing described creaking, banging and clicking in the apartments, elevators that stopped and trapped residents, and water damage traced to plumbing work. The building stands and is occupied, and the claims are allegations in a civil suit rather than findings, but they are on the record and no page about slender towers should leave them out.
Why the tall ones are apartments now
Office rent per square foot barely rises with height. A tenant on the 60th floor pays roughly what a tenant on the 30th pays, because the lease is priced on the market, the fit-out and the address. The extra elevators, thicker columns and longer construction schedule that come with height are not recovered.
Apartments price differently. A buyer pays for the view, and the view improves with every floor, so the price per square foot climbs the whole way up. The top apartments at Central Park Tower were listed in the tens of millions, which pays for a structure that no office tenant would fund. That is the arithmetic behindthe supertall boom: the record moved to housing because housing is where height sells.
The pattern is not only American. Most of Hong Kong's tall buildings are residential, because a city of 7.5 million on buildable land the size of a borough has nowhere else to put people, and the Dubai towers in the table above are apartment blocks built for a market of expatriate buyers. Hong Kong's towers run to 40 and 50 floors in the ordinary case rather than 100, which is the other half of the point: residential height is a volume business there and a luxury product on 57th Street.