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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