Cross sections of 6 skyscrapers. Before zoning, a big tall box, 1916 zoning, with the famous wedding cake setbacks, 1961 floor area ratio limits, a shorter, smaller box, air rights, showing area transferred from a neighbor, mechanical void, showing a big empty room at the lower levels, and ice pop building, showing a tower on a stick.

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   Alfred Twu (alfredtwu@sfba.social)'s status on Friday, 11-Aug-2023 21:46:42 JST Alfred Twu

   While New York's skinny towers are hardly ordinary, like the other homes on this blog, they're a commodity whose design is shaped by zoning.
   This post, on Mechanical Voids, also is a history of highrises, from wedding cakes to ice pops: https://ordinaryhomes.blogspot.com/2023/08/mechanical-void.html

   What's a mechanical void? In NYC and most other cities, zoning limits the amount of square feet a building can have. To get better views, a mechanical void is a very tall, mostly empty equipment room that pushes the rest of the floors higher.

   The city banned them, and developers responded by taking the walls off, with the latest proposals looking like ice pops - the main floors perched above a stick that contains the stairs and elevators.

   #architecture