City Shapes

The proliferation of “pencil towers” south of Central Park in Manhattan seems to upset many. There have been critical pieces throughout popular news sources such as The Guardian.

The variety of buildings, tall and skinny, flat and long and everything in between has always been a part of the city, but the rise of pencil thin towers is new to New York. The below photos from The Guardian showcase why people are upset.

Further comments detailed on Treehugger.com: “There is really not much good that can be said about these buildings other than admiring the engineering. The carbon burden is incredibly high; as rich as they are, the owners contribute little to the city; the buildings are terrible at ground level because it is all loading and parking and lobby; many complain that in New York, their shadows are ruining Central Park. They are a thumb in the eye of everyone else in the city.”

Much of this is not architectural criticism, rather criticism of the super-rich buying multimillion dollar units and never occupying them; just a place to park their money.  

Below is a diagram prepared by the architectural firm KPF showing what could become of midtown if all the potential sites for pencil towers were developed. To accomplish that plan a developer would need purchase the air rights of neighboring sites and stack those rights vertically to get the desired height.

Such pencil towers actually date back to the 13^th century. The most known example of the lives of the rich and famous of that time were the 72 towers (14 currently remain) in the Italian hill town of San Gimignano.

Cities have always had various geometries. To think that the shapes must be identical is not an interesting way to put the pieces together in my opinion. To design our cities in an even geometry as in the diagrams below is rather mundane in comparison to the variety of building shapes possible.

An example of a single long and low, which can be combined with other shapes, is the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco (under construction illustration below).

Rectangular shapes lined up in a row, like below, can be articulated in a more interesting manner as in the San Francisco Presidio (below).

Most cities though have organically evolved into a variety of cityscapes, with an occasional tower here and there or even grouped together for emphasis. Size, shape, attitude, interval, and direction of the geometry is always the most interesting part.  As a result, these shapes can create spatial overlay and procession, both literal and perceptual.

Variety can also be seen in the topography as well, like on Davis Street in San Francisco as it steps up the hill.

Often a tower is placed for emphasis, as in the most famous example, the Eiffel Tower, in its emphatic shape dominating the Paris skyline. San Francisco too has Sutro Tower (below), and even though maligned, is still a dominant feature on the city skyline. It does make a contrasting statement. The city also has beautiful Golden Gate Bridge towers as well as the downtown mid- and high-rise commercial towers, all grouped together as below.

In direct contrast to these city shapes is the waterfront. Ships and boats take on a completely separate set of geometries.

Other than the above, the watercolor sketches in this blog post are from my personal sketchbook. This recent controversy over New York’s pencil towers reignited my thinking around how we see cityscapes when I am sketching.

Blog post written by Senior Architect David Tritt.