The Downside to Life in a Supertall Tower: Leaks, Creaks, Breaks

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/realestate/luxury-high-rise-432-park.html

by ksec • 5 years ago

174 144 5 years ago

ggm• 5 years ago

Schadenfreude but.. also not. Nobody wants to have a home beset by a ticking clock you can't stop, rich or poor its the minor irritation which nags. For the poor it's the constant hunt for newspaper to wrap themselves in over a steam vent. For the rich, it's losing your free breakfast in a Michelin starred restaurant you have to spend $15,000 pa in by contract, but which is closed by covid.

Oh well. Anyway..

melq• 5 years ago

I get where you're coming from, but sheesh you could hardly have made a more tone deaf analogy.

Aside from the fact that their private restaurant is almost certainly not closed, some billionaires being inconvenienced by what amounts to minor condo fees on their second (or third, or fourth) home is wildly different than a person with no home struggling to keep themselves warm at night. And 'wildly different' is an understatement.

neonate• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/DZy0r

ramraj07• 5 years ago

I get conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand it's highly unlikely anyone in that tower would get a shred of empathy from the common man (and highly unlikely this is even one of their 5 other homes), but on the other it's just a damn shame that some of the most prominent landmarks in the greatest city in the world are crappy places to live at. I'm not of the opinion they're eyesores - the nyc Skyline was stagnant for decades until these needles came in. One way or another progress in that regard is good?

Razengan• 5 years ago

the nyc Skyline was stagnant for decades until these needles came in.

Maybe it's time to embrace the future and replace these with arcologies.

nradov• 5 years ago

Also see the Millennium Tower in San Francisco which is sinking and leaning. They built it on unstable ground without a sufficiently deep foundation.

taneq• 5 years ago

Could have taken some hints from the Italians...

tedunangst2• 5 years ago

And taxpayers get to pay for fixing it. Nice.

vmception2• 5 years ago

interesting. from the article

making clear that even multimillion-dollar price tags do not guarantee problem-free living

this reiterates that you can make a living simply catering to wealthy people's problems instead of dismissing them

pick and choose your battles

RodgerTheGreat• 5 years ago

You can make a living in organized crime.

You can make a living polluting the environment.

You can make a living defending corruption, helping the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer.

The problems of the wealthy are as the problems of a tick sucking the lifeblood from a host. Rest assured that extending them empathy and compassion will be a strictly one-sided arrangement when push comes to shove.

lotsofpulp• 5 years ago

I'm not of the opinion they're eyesores - the nyc Skyline was stagnant for decades until these needles came in. One way or another progress in that regard is good?

What “good” does a skyline do for society? The enormous costs to build super talls would go much further in myriad other ways, even just by making a few tall or many regular size buildings. Very far from progress if you as me.

Actually, I would take the construction of a novel building just to give views and prestige to less than one hundred families to be evidence of societal regression, since it can be used as a proxy for extreme wealth inequality.

dionidium2• 5 years ago

The enormous costs to build super talls would go much further in myriad other ways, even just by making a few tall or many regular size buildings.

Note that these supertalls only exist in the first place because it's artificially difficult to build regular-sized buildings in Manhattan. It's very unlikely anybody would have bothered building anything in this specific form if not for the onerous zoning codes the developers were skirting when they designed them.

More info: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-11/gaming-ne...

TomSwirly2• 5 years ago

I'm not of the opinion they're eyesores - the nyc Skyline was stagnant for decades until these needles came in.

This is just consumption for consumption's sake. You shouldn't throw away a building in ten or twenty years just beecause you get tired of it!

Humans have to get over the obsessive consumption if we are to survive the twenty first century.

Animats• 5 years ago

It's a pain having a building that flexes. Everything needs expansion joints, and ordinary building materials aren't designed for that. The steelwork can handle it, but wallboard can't.

xyst• 5 years ago

for once, a subsection of rich people get a taste of what most regular people go through on a daily basis

just goes to show that this project might have spent more money on marketing and advertising rather than on their engineering and architect departments.

nefitty• 5 years ago

I get the schadenfreude. I used to dismiss the suffering of people who were “beyond” the survival levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. This changed for me when I read that Peter Singer himself focuses on influencing survival-level needs for those in poverty because they are more immediate and are more quantifiable.

He said something like, “Well-off people suffer, of course, but those types of suffering are more difficult to measure and entail interventions beyond vaccines or food distribution. I don’t focus on those types of suffering because there so much of the basic kind and also because it’s too hard of a problem.”

When I segmented suffering by the individuals’ place on Maslow’s hierarchy, it helped me develop more compassion for the rich than is in vogue. “Oh, that guy driving that Lamborghini isn’t hungry, but he might be the loneliest person I’ve ever met.”

kevin_thibedeau3• 5 years ago

Having to take the freight elevator to your unfinished $20M apartment isn't suffering. These are spoiled brats grown up.

S53Vflnr4n4• 5 years ago

I don’t think they will put up with these issues and live there like the rest of us. They are only concerned about the property value going down.

indy• 5 years ago

They won't get a taste though. These people are rich enough that at the first sign of a leak in their apartment they'll have people to book them into a luxury hotel before flying off to another apartment, or maybe a little holiday to help them get over the stress they've had to 'endure'.

plutonorm• 5 years ago

I console myself with the notion: Rich people are often unhappy because they have a very high 'drive'.

It is the dissatisfaction with what we have that makes us unhappy. Dopamine has a lot to answer for, because if you're high in dopamine you are constantly searching without ever succeeding.

So the very thing that makes successful people successful also tends to make them unhappy.

The state of searching is a state of dissatisfaction. You have to stop searching in order to be content.

throwawaysea• 5 years ago

I know a lot of people hate the rich and are happy to see such misery befall them. But for many I think a residence here may have been something like a lifelong dream, and to have their money tied up in a condo that is repeatedly flooded sounds awful. Not to mention the stress and anxiety that comes with such situations. Homeowners with more modest homes will also know the pain and frustration if they have dealt with bad contractors or made a regrettable home purchase.

cm2187• 5 years ago

Noise is what turns me off from high rise residential buildings. When you watch the construction, many don’t event have concrete walls between apartments on the same floor, and I am ready to guess the concrete floors are as thin as required to keep the weight of the structure down. Add to that all-glass external walls, and I only heard stories from friends who live there that you hear everything your neighbours do, particularly walking on wooden floor.

katbyte• 5 years ago

Depends on the apartment and when it was built - you can do good or bad noise insulation.

Live in a condo and never hear anyone on my floor, and once a month maybe? Sorta hear someone above me. Windows closed I head nothing from outside

elyobo• 5 years ago

Agreed, live on the 37th floor of a 45 floor building - it's not exactly high by these standards, but still decently high. Never hear side neighbours, every now and then I hear something quiet from upstairs.

I used to rent here, the owner was selling, so we bought it instead of moving.

ilkkao• 5 years ago

I live in Europe and decided to buy an apartment from a building that has been constructed in 1936. Brick walls are about 2ft thick, no issues with the neighbor noise. Still happy with my choice.

I think it's the same everywhere. Construction companies optimize everything to make more profit. Hundred years ago, at least here, apartment buildings were constructed mainly by people that had become wealthy. They directly hired builders and monitored the quality. Many times reserved the biggest apartment for themselves.

mjevans• 5 years ago

The noise, the lack of ventilation design, and if it isn't "bomb" like use of the trash chute it's someone tossing a bag in that gets caught and blocks it.

They may as well be gilded jail cells. Worse, because everyone's stuck as a renter, there's inherently no true sense of community or consideration to neighbors.

jandrewrogers• 5 years ago

I’ve lived in high-rise buildings in Seattle where the walls were effectively soundproof. Your neighbors could be as loud as they wanted to be and you never heard them. It took some heavy crashes on the floors above for you to hear the dull thud. Quality of construction matters a lot. Making apartment buildings highly insulated sound-wise is old science, not magic.

jansan2• 5 years ago

Even dry walls can be made virtually sound proof. If you look at the pdf below (it's in German) on page 49, you can see that noise reduction of almost 80dB is possible. This is impressive. For reference, a very simple drywall has a noise reduction of roughly 45dB.

https://www.knauf.de/wmv/?id=1112 (link updated, thanks for pointing this out)

baybal23• 5 years ago

Soundproofing eats a lot into square metres. It's one of the biggest luxury in highrises.

S53Vflnr4n4• 5 years ago

Call me crazy but when I rent a condo, I try google street maps and go back in history and if I am lucky I get to see the construction phase. That will give an idea about how thick the concrete and the overall structure is. Another way is to look at the balconies. The floor will be as thick as balconies. The walls are a hit or miss. But if you knock on them and press your ears you can get some idea. Apartments near to a garbage chute or elevator will be noisy if not properly soundproofed.

Erlich_Bachman• 5 years ago

I feel like this is why we're on HN for :P

Where do you find the button for viewing the history of street view? Is it on the normal street view interface, or do you have to use an additional service/hackery?

BoorishBears2• 5 years ago

This sounds like utter nonsense.

I've lived in several high rises here in NYC and 99% of the difference in the quiet ones is not stuff that you'd see from street view.

Things like sound deadening underlayment and wall insulation, floorplans designed so that quieter rooms like a bedroom aren't next to louder ones like a living room.

I know HN is full of experts and their field but this is a stretch past stretches. No idea what kind if Rain Man engineer could tell you how quiet an apartment will be from street views.

The way you tell if a place is quiet is the reviews mostly. People like privacy, one of the easiest complaints to find is "feel like I hear everything my neighbors do"

Breza3• 5 years ago

That's a neat idea! Although the last three places I've lived have been over eighty years old. I guess when you get that far back in time, you can usually assume that the building is pretty darn solid.

kenneth• 5 years ago

The tower only has one apartment per floor, so at least that's one thing they don't need to worry about.

justinclift3• 5 years ago

Maybe it's a case of different construction standards in different countries?

In Australia, I used to have an apartment in Eureka Tower:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Tower

The windows there were double glazed (good for heat and noise insulation), and I guess the walls were fairly thick as noise from neighbours was never a problem.

The only significant problem, and specific to that building, was the designers massively underspec-ed the cooling. So on summer days (29C -> ~44C) the air conditioning throughout the whole tower was completely useless. Sweltering hot. :(

quicklime• 5 years ago

I don't think it's purely a location-based thing. Not that long ago, Australia 108 became Melbourne's tallest building after surpassing the Eureka Tower in height. The residents there complained of walls that creak and crack like what you'd hear in a ship (which the 432 Park residents are also complaining about).

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/residents-of-mel...

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/incorrect-constr...

sershe• 5 years ago

I think it's more typical for apartments.. I've only rented a concrete condo once (in Vancouver), and I distinctly remember getting out of the elevator and feeling like I just walked into a heavy metal concert, then getting into my unit next door to the source and hearing... nothing. It was pretty amazing. But the apartments at the same price point had no noise isolation.

vineyardmike2• 5 years ago

I don't know where your friends lived, but I've lived in quite a few high rises (most recently 3 in seattle, built 2015, '17, '19) and the thing that draws me back to them is how I can NEVER hear my neighbors. The '19 has an awful lot of street noise, but the 17 was so silent it was incredible (and has the biggest windows).

sam_bristow• 5 years ago

Ignoring the content of the article for a second - how exactly was the author pronouncing that title in their head?

Leeks creeks breeks? Lakes crakes brakes?

mmanfrin• 5 years ago

Leeks, Creaks, Breaks -- they're not all meant to rhyme. The last element is pronounced differently.

I don't know what the term for it would be, but it's reminding me of 'Planes, Trains, and Automobiles'. Rhyme, Rhyme, Schema Deviation.

tasuki2• 5 years ago

Adding to the confusion is that the "ee" is pronounced the same as the first "ea" which in turn is pronounced differently than the second "ea".

napier• 5 years ago

My heart weeps and I’m reminded of the novel ‘Highrise’by J. G. Ballard.

colordrops• 5 years ago

I don't understand how anyone would want to live in a high rise. Rational or not, if feels dangerous to live high up in a narrow bottlenecked artificial construct.

aerovistae• 5 years ago

I feel the same way. A fire in a building like that would be inescapable.

BoorishBears2• 5 years ago

We had a fire about 10 floors above me in a 60 story building. Never even got an alarm for it.

Modern building practices mean that it's not that easy for a fire to spread, and evacuating the entire building is a last resort.

Every apartment has fire rated doors with a spring forcing them closed (so even if you leave in a panic the door will close behind you)

The interior doors also seem pretty heavy to me, they don't have a fire rating placard but I wouldn't be surprised if they were picked with fire resistance in mind.

I'm lowest worry is fire, highest is easily elevators.

One day at my last building I hears a very loud crashing sound, look in the hallway and FDNY was cutting a hole in a wall to access a stuck elevator on a separate elevator bank...

On one hand, the fact the failed elevator stopped is good, on the other whoever was inside probably had a truly awful time. M

BrentOzar• 5 years ago

Quick rundown of the advantages (I usually live in high-rises):

High rises usually have spectacular shared amenities: grand pools, exercise rooms, party rooms, theaters, etc. One of mine had outdoor grilling areas that you didn't even have to clean up: the apartment had cleaning staff who would scour the grills every day.

High rises usually have 24/7 door staff to sign for & lock up packages, get taxis, handle dry cleaning, store grocery deliveries in a fridge, and let you into your unit if you get locked out. The sheer number of units makes this cost-effective for them because the costs are shared across all tenants.

High rises usually have maintenance staff during business hours and on call after hours to fix issues. Sometimes you can also hire them for handyman duties, too - I've had them install TVs, hang green screens, or paint a wall.

High rises are often the only cost-effective way to live in the core of a really vibrant city like Chicago: we couldn't have afforded a town home, let alone a single family home.

klodolph• 5 years ago

High rises are the closest thing we have to arcologies.

Not saying that they’re close to arcologies, just that they’re the closest.

tehwalrus• 5 years ago

In the UK, high rises are cheap social housing, and rarely have any of these features.

(it's possible a few nice ones were built here at there, but those are the exception - people here value houses and gardens, and nobody builds high rises with large floorspace.)

C.f. the fallout from the Grenfell Tower fire. Most of our tower blocks are like that, and all the flats are currently impossible to sell because they all have the wrong, dangerously flammable cladding on.

justinclift3• 5 years ago

And not having to mow the lawn! :)

baybal23• 5 years ago

Cost?

choeger• 5 years ago

Initial findings showed that 73 percent of mechanical, electrical and plumbing components observed failed to conform with the developers’ drawings

How is that even legal? Let alone technically possible? How does construction of these monsters work? "Yo, Bert, I need some 5x5 high-elastic steel framing for the 72th floor!" "Sorry man, we ran out of that when we 'redesigned' the elevator shaft, how about you take this plywood we should have used for the 68th floor?"

kevin_thibedeau3• 5 years ago

It's going to get even better when the concrete starts spalling off in 40 years of swaying in the wind.

pmontra2• 5 years ago

Do they use concrete in those towers or is it all steel?

Tade0• 5 years ago

A friend of mine used to design electrical components for highways.

The workers would almost always try to assemble the devices as fast as possible, cutting corners here and there.

uxhacker• 5 years ago

I am doing a restoration of an old palace in Poland, the biggest issue is often the contractors do not understand the architect’s drawings.

The drawings are more for the regulators such as building control than actually for the people working on site.

Talking to the constructors it is normal for architects to specify the impossible, leaving it to the constructor to actually make it up on the job.

Somebody said to me that over 30% of construction costs is waste.

It looks like there is an opportunity to implement lean methods in construction. And weirdly implement Alexander’s ideas patterns and anti patterns.

loup-vaillant4• 5 years ago

Talking to the constructors it is normal for architects to specify the impossible

If the drawings are indeed for regulators, then architects should be sued when they prove to be impossible impossible. Failing that, we should get rid of architects to begin with (if they draw impossible things, what good are they?), and have actual engineers draw something that can actually be built. (Of course, the engineer should risk a lawsuit if something goes wrong).

raihansaputra3• 5 years ago

I think Alexander's ideas and patterns are very lean processes instead. He see what's the terrain like, what's the use like, builds a bit, and reevaluates along the way. He even explicitly have drawings rendered 'for regulation' but changes it after it's built.

Context: I'm assuming Alexander here refers to Christopher Alexander. He has authored books related to identifying architecture patterns with 'liveness' in them, from the very small to the big scale. I think a lot of his ideas can be applied to software too and even really matches up with Extreme Programming. I recommend reading The Nature of Order for the fundamentals of his ideas and how it fits with the world. I'll refer to him as CA in this comment.

I think it's the overspecialisation of roles and the 'waterfall' aspect of the engineering that normalises this. The architect don't (or can't) verify whether their designs work along the way. CA once described a story where he needs a constant feedback with the soil engineer for the start of the project but his request is denied by the client. The client wants the engineer to start and finish his survey first and then for CA to receive the reports only. CA ended up declining to work with the client due to that. As with Software Engineering/Development, there are questions that only surfaces when we do a part of the building, and can't be predicted. This is why the continuous feedback is important. I'm not sure whether the architect in your case _can_ come back to the site and direct the constructors against the drawings, even if the later directions are more suitable to build.

It's a bit weird that now we're taking missed plans as the default, when the Empire State Building (and NYC skyscrapers of the time) ran ahead of their schedule, with Lean principles by focusing on constraints and workflow instead of planning the minute details: https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of...

I'm afraid that a lot of churn in Software Development also comes from a similar overspecialisation, overplanning, and the wrong kind of feedback loops. 30% of costs wasted seems like the better end for software. The difference is that building physical buildings has happened for thousands of years and there is a lot of history to compare with the current day. Software has at most 100 years of history, and currently it's still very much the wild west and every team is trying to stumble upon a process that is sustainable. This doesn't even count that a lot of developers see themselves and the job differently, and the organization also sees the Tech/Engineering team differently.

This comment is more of a rambling than a coherent thought, but I thought I'd get it out there. I'm sure I'm not the only one feeling like the current Software Development process is a mess. There has been good efforts (Extreme Programming and agile, not branded Agile) and current good effort (Basecamp's evangelism of their work process and the Shape Up book) to carve a sane way, but it needs to be the normal practice instead of the contrarian view/practice.

Triv888• 5 years ago

They cut down waste a lot when it comes to manufactured home,s pre-built walls, etc..

throw0101a2• 5 years ago

The drawings are more for the regulators such as building control than actually for the people working on site.

It would also depend on the architect, primary contractor, and what kind of relationship they have. Sometimes plans are just thrown over the wall, but other times there is more collaboration.

I watch the YouTube channel of Matt Risinger, a building science focused contractor in Austin, Texas, and he seems talk with architects a lot (and they supposedly make up a good portion of his viewing audience). He regularly features Steve Baczek for example, on both his main channel and the 'secondary' Build Show Network, and latter does get into the details of the building process:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwDhSCV3ixQ

Talking to the constructors it is normal for architects to specify the impossible, leaving it to the constructor to actually make it up on the job.

Baczek shows some plan details:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUpkDi-QD2E

Both Risinger and Baczek subscribe to trying to achieve the 'perfect wall' on the outside:

* https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-t...

amelius• 5 years ago

How is that even legal?

I suppose an engineer has to sign for it.

fsloth• 5 years ago

"Let alone technically possible?"

Most of MEP work is laying out pipes and wires so that the fixtures such as airvents, electric sockets and so on get connected to the system. The MEP contractor's task (overly simplifying) is to punch holes into walls and drag their spans of pipes and whatnot through them.

The designs' intent is to specify the fixtures, and how the perform (airflow etc). The subcontractor basically promises that they make those fixtures do their job - and not that their wiring and whatnot follows any specific plan necessarily.

Modern digital workflows are getting slowly integrated to the process and they may improve the productivity and quality in long term.

PaulHoule3• 5 years ago

This is why it takes forever to build a nuclear power plant.

This kind of 'normalization of deviance' is normal in normal construction, but has to be either reworked or formally normalized in critical work.

throwanem• 5 years ago

Buildings not exactly matching the architect's original design is so common that there's a term, "as-builts", for the set of drawings the prime contractor prepares and delivers along with the building, showing what was actually built (hence the name) and, by comparison with the originals, what was changed in the course of the build.

I'm not the right kind of engineer to hazard a guess as to whether this is an unusually high variance for this scale of project. We also don't know what "failed to conform" means - the language is as vague as, given the ubiquity of changes at build time, intentionally pejorative. There's really not enough here to judge either the architect or the contractor; it could be a brilliant design badly implemented, or it could be a terrible design the contractor did their best to make work, and no one here or in the NYT article, including its writer, has enough information to say which.

ArchitectAnon• 5 years ago

Your example is not that far off, I know of a building where the subcontractor’s subcontractor substituted a less elastic steel and it caused bolts to fail with the potential to drop a few 100m out of the sky and land on the public below. I don’t know the details but the subcontractor could probably only have picked up the defect by hiring a metallurgist to spot check the bolts to verify that it was the right steel they had been supplied with and I’m guessing that wasn’t done.

More generally, what often happens with big projects like this is the design team is not connected with the contractors that build the job. The reason why this happens is because early in the design stage when you speak to a main contractor you don’t get to talk to the actual subcontractors that will build the thing, you are essentially speaking to the salesmen that will eventually get their buying guys to hire subcontractors to do the actual work. If they are brought on early then Contractors typically find ways to use proprietary lock in and cost ratcheting techniques to increase the cost of a build once they have secured the job so to avoid this a fairly common setup for a building of this size is for a design team to prepare drawings and a performance specification to a level of detail that gets you regulatory compliance, but not a full nuts and bolts design with buildability assessed. This is not just the architectural design but also the structures, M&E, security, landscape etc. So, for example, the electrical design might be a block diagram and the loads, but the bus bars might not be sized and the suppliers for all the switchgear wont be selected. At pinch points there may be a more detailed reference design.

At this point there will be a design build contract made between the contractor and the client based on the partially complete design. This design gets handed over to the contractor to complete and the contractor’s engineers take over and complete the details. Sometimes some of the original design team gets novated from the client to the contractor, quite often only the architects but you have to be really sharp in your negotiations if you do this because once they have you hooked there will be huge time and cost pressure to complete the designs for less fees and to find ways to save money.

A rule of thumb I use is that on a A1 sheet’s worth of information takes about 1 person week to complete when you include all the research. Often with consultations with other specialists this work will be stretched over a couple of months. On a big project there will be 10s of thousands of drawings in play. This can’t be rushed if you don’t want any mistakes, but it almost always is and if you are an engineer or an architect working for the contractor at this point there is huge pressure to cut corners. Non-famous architects and engineers are actually not very well paid compared to other professionals and we tend to work very long unpaid hours with workers rights laws regularly flouted, e.g. firing pregnant women etc.

Another issue is that there is corruption in the buying department of the main contractor as well, they have gold watches and get taken on days out to go and ‘bet on horse racing’ by the subcontractors.

So the contractor’s incentive to cut costs and corruption cause a lot of last minute design changes to use a ‘preferred supplier’ or to reduce complexity or use cheaper materials. When coupled with the time pressure, things go wrong.

Everyone will say, ‘oh you architects should design everything properly down to the last detail, there should be PLM models like the aircraft industry’ but the fact is every building is a prototype, a building this large has a much higher margin of safety but it is as complicated as an airliner and airliners cost a lot more money to develop than buildings. No-one is willing to pay for the time input, they would rather let the contractor bodge it on site, often contractors will end up using the reference designs and filling the details themselves on site, e.g. using drawings never intended to be construction information.

Another one is ‘well then you should use more standardisation’ from personal experience in trying to make my own business more profitable, you can try to standardise construction details but there are a lot of high level client influenced design decisions that ripple right through a building down to the 1:2 construction details so this only works up to a point. I’ve managed to break my details down into reusable components, but I’ve not managed to literally reuse the same drawings for multiple projects.

As we’ve seen with the 737 Max debacle the airline industry is not immune from these kind of mistakes, I think ultimately the problem is probably more with project management and construction contracting culture than it is with ‘the Architects are hand wavy artists’ (we’re mostly not)

JayPeaEm• 5 years ago

How is that even legal?

It's not legal.

I work in an industry that monitors such things and recommends Banks/Lenders not pay if/when these discrepancies arise (Construction Risk Management).

The appropriate party will make revisions and then prove that that change won't affect the overall project.

Let alone technically possible?

On larger projects, Subcontractors of Subcontractors of Subcontractors can become lazy, use materials not rated for their intended use, someone doesn't double check it since they're lazy, clicks a checkbox and calls it done; out of sight out of mind.

How does construction of these monsters work?

Preconstruction Due Diligence, Funding via Banks, Approval/Contract Signing, Mobilization to Site, Construction of Building, Final Inspections & Warranties transfered, a Certificate of Occupancy issued, and people move in.

With mega projects, you have so many moving parts that something will fall through the cracks. Some material got substituted, the pent house staircase dimensions are 2-inches off creating a variance approval, but that dimension now affects the elevator machine room, they used Cast Iron Pipe on Floors 1-10 then PVC at 11-40 and there's issues at the different pipe connections; it just cascades. This is the main reason I also work in Building Information Modeling (BIM) to mitigate such problems.

The whole point of my industry is to act as a third party between the Developer & Bank/Lender, opine on the Preconstruction Documents (Contracts, Geotech, Budget, Schedule), document the Construction each month via photos, attend Meetings, review the application for payment, and flag the bank when something changes (No Energy Star appliances suddenly? Variance? Certain brand of vinyl flooring stock low so substitute it with vinyl tile? Change Orders about to deplete the Contingency?)

It becomes such an undertaking after a certain budget size or apartment unit amount. Eventually, people get stretched thing or get lazy, they're over budget, they've gone way past their scheduled completion date and just don't care since their next project is starting up and Permits are taking way longer to get; just happens.

Hope this gives a little perspective.

tzs• 5 years ago

I wonder if it would help avoid some of these issues if all materials used in the building by all the different contractors and subcontractors and subsubcontractors etc were required to come through a single entity?

That wouldn't help with someone getting the dimensions wrong on a staircase, but it could catch things like a contractor wanting to use the wrong kind of pipe of floor material or appliance.

carrozo• 5 years ago

This feels like a powerful metaphor for the times we live in; over-promised and under-delivered; the value of image over reality; little emperors everywhere with no clothes. Would make a great film. :)

tourist_• 5 years ago

I was thinking of buying one of these if my GME stonks had been short squeezed :)

mech422• 5 years ago

Foiled Again! :-)

ksec2• 5 years ago

I submitted this for just to make another point for my own Reference. Turns out there are enough interest for it to get onto Front page :)

For nearly 7 years, I have been asking the same question, Why Tall and Skinny? How far do the building Sway during High Wind? How do sound insulation work etc? And also the same question to Central Park Tower, Steinway Tower.

SkyScrapper isn't new. But Tall and Skinny top to bottom SkyScrapper is very new ( to me at least ), and to make the matter worst this is Residential. It is one thing to work in such environment during the day, it is completely different having to stay and rest at night in one. The building would sway enough during High Wind and Cyclone you would get sea sick. And that is with the commercial building which tends to have a much larger / thicker base and lots of weight while adding massive damper. Sound / Noise insulation is also problematic because doing any of it would add weight.

Central Park Tower, if I remember correctly, mentioned something about AWS and Cloud Computing meant they could do simulation that couldn't be done before! Technology has improved with better Material Science! And Steinway Tower is famous for its "tuned" mass damper. But again none to these are new.

So whenever I have my own dose of skepticism, I was always met with people calling me idiots; "You think the Billionaires dont do their Due Diligence?"

Having said that this article is only about 432 Park Avenue. Central Park Tower and Steinway Tower are still not completed. So may be they are really better with some "magic" technology improvement. I am just skeptical, and will have to wait and see.

herendin• 5 years ago

Compare property price to land price. Then consider that apartments need windows, so building footprint is limited

tomatotomato37• 5 years ago

I wonder if the old guard of mega skyscrapers like the Empire State or Chrysler suffered from these problems too, or it's just inherent to the new skinny towers popping up.

baybal23• 5 years ago

They aren't that tall. 300m buildings are everywhere in China.

Quite ordinary residentials are creeping on 200m.

But 300m+ building all require very special engineering. Glazing designs for <300m building will not suit a 300m+ building.

HVAC, water, and savage systems for supertall skyscrapers are still more or less a case, by case designs.

I lived in a few quite tall 200+ buildings. Leaks seem to be unavoidable with curtain walls, and the only remedy is to have glazing engineers fixing them every year.

Water supply is also finicky, and that's an inherent property of having so much apartments relying on a single pipe run.

Booming noise in ventilation is possible to avoid with extra equipment, or simply solid vent shafts at extra cost, but I experienced it even in buildings with $1m+ apartments. So, I doubt construction companies will bother ever fixing this en masse.

Sound insulation! Yes, there is no trick for it than thicker walls, and bigger gaps in between them, and it costs a lot, really a lot. You don't get it in highrises no matter the cost, unless it's being sold on this specifically.

Abimelex• 5 years ago

at this point after a few years it would be probably very convenient to have a good insurance and a "random airplane" flying into the tower.

yc-kraln• 5 years ago

My first house was a condo in a building which had been built about ~2 years before I moved in; I joined the board as the developer was transitioning out and handing over responsibility to the tenants.

This sounds exactly like what happened with us, just on a grander scale. Things like the post-tensioned concrete construction where the steel post-tensioner cables were left exposed to the elements, severe life-safety issues, electronics and machines which died far too early from being under-spec'd and improperly installed.

The developer, of course, had incorporated a new company just for the building, and it was super easy for them to let it go bankrupt. In the end we managed to recoup some costs, but had to raise everyone's fees to cover the reduced lifetime of some of the major structural elements of the building.

nemo44x• 5 years ago

It’s interesting because I’ve heard from numerous people that work in construction that they would never buy into most of the new construction they worked on. Especially expensive condos in popular urban locations. Bare minimum construction that saves on both material and labor costs.

Buy old and renovate has been something I’ve been told by various people.

Breza3• 5 years ago

I absolutely love my ninety year old house. It's remarkably solid and there's no sound of settling or anything like that. Although apparently it was in vogue to put broken glass along fence lines during the eighties for security, which makes gardening adventurous...

jberryman• 5 years ago

I had a summer job in college with a real estate partnership that consisted entirely of filing unopened bills and liens into four different bins based on the project, each a different company that presumably was about to go bankrupt.

The only time I saw the two owners was when I started and when the take me out to lunch when they abruptly (but not unexpectedly) let me go.

At that meal one of the two was really excited about a new project: some turn-key restaurant idea, and how he'd only hire "hot waitresses".

arminiusreturns• 5 years ago

The real juice here for those who want some good "conspiracy theory" level "connections everywhere" reading: CIM group. If you want to know about LA/NY real estate, political subterfuge (including PACs and pension funds), etc from the "how things really work" angle, just give them a search and read a few articles.

Even more fun: try to guess what the name stands for.

ksec2• 5 years ago

Turns out it wasn't easy to google what the name stands for.

The meaning of the three letters in CIM Group’s name is one of real estate’s best-kept secrets. But it might as well stand for Condos In Manhattan

https://therealdeal.com/2016/12/13/manhattans-new-skyline-ci...

asah• 5 years ago

For this reason, I don't buy new and instead buy in places that have been "burned in" and where I can talk with current and previous inhabitant(s) and read complaints online. If you have "that" kind of money, you can always remodel.

Flipping it around, that due diligence can also result in amazing deals on places that non-engineers are too afraid to touch.

Breza3• 5 years ago

Agreed all around, especially about due diligence. My wife found a house that had been on the market for months in a market where most houses were going under contract before we could get a tour. Description said it was "cozy and historic." Lots of warning signs. She booked a showing anyway. We dug did our due diligence and we've lived here happily for three years.

dathinab3• 5 years ago

Why do we even build (high) sky scrapers?

IMHO they make no sense and only seem to exist because either broken local economies or people getting unhealthy obsessed with showing power. I.e. both things which should be fixed without sky scrapers.

I mean sure "small" sky scrapers can make sense but there is a point where the additional cost and safety problems just by far outweigh any real benefits I believe.

I mean (ignoring ground price) it's as far as I know much cheaper to build two 100m sky scrapers then building a single 200m sky scraper.

So I would always prefer a view high but not supper high buildings over one or two super high buildings.

I mean the moment it's no longer rentable to put (non super high end) apartments into most floors of a building it IMHO should generally not be build.

Schiendelman3• 5 years ago

I’m seeing you fall into a common fallacy when discussing buildings. “Two buildings are cheaper than one” - sure, if you ignore the land, and all the processes of zoning, permitting, and construction management. If you want to understand all this better, start learning about those!

dathinab3• 5 years ago

Ouch,

First I explicitly excluded the ground price so it should be obvious that I'm well aware of it.

Second if zoning and permitting make it more economical to build buildings which on itself are fundamentally problematic than maybe zoning and permitting needs to be changed.

Besides that the cost of construction management for one large building compared to multiple smaller buildings(1) should be larger because of additional requirements for material verification etc. due to having stricter requirements to materials and material quality which you simply don't have on smaller buildings. And sure as we can see from quite a bunch of (often by now older) sky scrapers the additional requirements where sometimes just ignored now leading to problems left and right.

EDIT: Just to be clear if you make it multiple projects instead of one it can very well be more expensive. But building multiple smaller (but not small) houses as one project using mostly the same blueprints for all of them, using the same contractors, same workers etc. is altogether a different matter.

EDIT2: The main drawback besides things like ground cost is the cost of creating a multiple fundaments. In turn simpler fundaments can normally be build but the cost can largely vary depending on the ground you are building on (like stability of the ground, ground water level etc.).

zimpenfish2• 5 years ago

"Ms. Abramovich and her husband, Mikhail, retired business owners who worked in the oil and gas business" sounds like one of those phrases that legal has spent a couple of days working over.

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