Pencil tower

For the skyscraper in France known as The Pencil, see Tour Part-Dieu.
432 Park Avenue (middle), a pencil tower in New York City

A pencil tower (also known as a skinny skyscraper,[1] pencil-thin tower, super-slender tower, or super-slim tower) is a high-rise building or skyscraper with a very high slenderness ratio that is very tall and thin.[2][3] There is no universal definition of how slender these buildings are to be categorized, but some definitions of 10:1 or 12:1 ratios and higher have been used.[4][5]

Hong Kong started developing pencil towers in the 1970s. Residential buildings of twenty or more stories with one unit per floor were built over small lots.[6][7] It has become one of the most common types of buildings in the city, making Hong Kong the world's highest concentration of pencil towers. Hong Kong's most notable towers are the 72-story Highcliff Tower, which has a slenderness ratio of 20:1, and its neighbor, The Summit, a 65-story residential building.[8][9]

In the 2010s, pencil towers became a new phenomenon of building design in New York City. The newer pencil towers on Manhattan's "Billionaires' Row" (a thin strip of Midtown near Central Park) are mostly supertalls.[10] The first of this new crop of super-slim towers was the 1,005 foot One57 tower.[11] Two pencil towers on a section of 57th Street made the street the most expensive address in the global real estate market, with 41 transactions above US$25 million from 2015 to 2019.[12]

Outside of Hong Kong and New York City, Melbourne has become the center of pencil towers.[13]

  1. ^ Higgins, Michelle (7 August 2015). "Keeping Skyscrapers from Blowing in the Wind". The New York Times.
  2. ^ "New York's Super-Slenders". The Skyscraper Museum. Retrieved 1 December 2020.
  3. ^ Clines, Francis X. (1 January 2015). "What's Happening to New York's Skyline?". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 December 2020.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference ce was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference Cheng was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference Dewolf was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ "Try a Little Slenderness: Explorations on the Hong Kong Pencil Tower". Faculty of Architecture, The University of Hong Kong. Retrieved 1 December 2020.
  8. ^ "Future City:20-21 Slender Towers". The Skyscraper Museum. Retrieved 1 December 2020.
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference scmp was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ Wainwright, Oliver (5 February 2019). "Super-tall, super-skinny, super-expensive: the 'pencil towers' of New York's super-rich". The Guardian. Retrieved 1 December 2020.
  11. ^ Safarik, Daniel; Wood, Antony. "Tall Building Numbers Again on the Rise". Structure Magazine (June 2014). Retrieved 3 December 2020.
  12. ^ Howley, Kathleen (29 December 2019). "New York Tops Ultra-Prime Residential Sales List As 'Pencil Thin' Wins". Forbes. Retrieved 1 December 2020.
  13. ^ Cheung, Alison (17 April 2019). "Why Melbourne will see more skinny skyscrapers". Commercial Real Estate. Retrieved 1 December 2020.