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Sky-High: A Critique of NYC's Supertall Towers from Top to Bottom
Part architectural guidebook and part critique, Sky-High documents the pencil-thin, supertall towers that are transforming New York City's skyline as well as its streets.
New York City's penchant for building skyward has reached new heights with its crop of supertall towers—those that rise at least 984 feet above the sidewalk. The city that never sleeps is also the city that never stops building ever higher, from the Woolworth and Chrysler buildings of an earlier race to the top to today's super luxury aeries of 57th Street's Billionaires' Row and the towers of the World Trade complex in Lower Manhattan.
Bruce Katz's extraordinary photographs capture a dozen of these self-styled odes to wealth and power, alongside Eric P. Nash's incisive critique documenting the evolution of the skyline, past and present, and the supertalls' transformative effects on the contemporary cityscape. Among the twelve buildings featured are One World Trade Center, Three World Trade Center, 30 Hudson Yards, 35 Hudson Yards, One57, 432 Park Avenue, 53West53, Central Park Tower, and One Vanderbilt.
New York City's penchant for building skyward has reached new heights with its crop of supertall towers—those that rise at least 984 feet above the sidewalk. The city that never sleeps is also the city that never stops building ever higher, from the Woolworth and Chrysler buildings of an earlier race to the top to today's super luxury aeries of 57th Street's Billionaires' Row and the towers of the World Trade complex in Lower Manhattan.
Bruce Katz's extraordinary photographs capture a dozen of these self-styled odes to wealth and power, alongside Eric P. Nash's incisive critique documenting the evolution of the skyline, past and present, and the supertalls' transformative effects on the contemporary cityscape. Among the twelve buildings featured are One World Trade Center, Three World Trade Center, 30 Hudson Yards, 35 Hudson Yards, One57, 432 Park Avenue, 53West53, Central Park Tower, and One Vanderbilt.
208 pages, Hardcover
Published June 27, 2023
7 people want to read
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September 3, 2023
Very little there. Felt more like a couple of magazine articles or posts in the Daily Hive than a book. On my Kindle it ended at around 35% and the rest were notes or index at the back.
I didn't feel the author (sorry) had anything tremendously interesting to say. It felt very personal and subjective ... not all the towers were terrible, this one's nice, that one's particularly bad, but not for any real substantive reasons. I certainly didn't get a sense of what it would be like to walk past them, look at them, have them as part of my neighbourhood.
So kind of a nothing book, didn't feel ultimately worth reading, I'd rather have spent my time elsewhere.
(Note: I'm a writer, so I suffer when I offer fewer than five stars. But these aren't ratings of quality, they're a subjective account of how much I liked the book: 5* = an unalloyed pleasure from start to finish, 4* = really enjoyed it, 3* = readable but not thrilling, 2* = disappointing, and 1* = hated it.)
I didn't feel the author (sorry) had anything tremendously interesting to say. It felt very personal and subjective ... not all the towers were terrible, this one's nice, that one's particularly bad, but not for any real substantive reasons. I certainly didn't get a sense of what it would be like to walk past them, look at them, have them as part of my neighbourhood.
So kind of a nothing book, didn't feel ultimately worth reading, I'd rather have spent my time elsewhere.
(Note: I'm a writer, so I suffer when I offer fewer than five stars. But these aren't ratings of quality, they're a subjective account of how much I liked the book: 5* = an unalloyed pleasure from start to finish, 4* = really enjoyed it, 3* = readable but not thrilling, 2* = disappointing, and 1* = hated it.)
Displaying 1 of 1 review