New York: Conspicuous Construction
they are most attractive to foreign nationals eager to secure a foothold in the US in the event of trouble in their homelands. International capital flight has thus been the decisive impetus in this booming sector of the New York property market, as people from all over the world seek a politically stable and financially secure haven for themselves and their assets.
.. The stratospheric amounts now at stake in newly built Manhattan buildings perhaps can be best understood by comparison with today’s contemporary art market, where multimillion-dollar paintings and sculptures have become favored instruments in the global transfer of vast and largely unregulated sums. The more expensive the object, the more money can be shifted internationally in one transaction, with the artworks themselves—mere markers to some degree—making a useful stopover at the Geneva Freeport, the tax-free air entrepôt in Switzerland used by dealers and collectors to reduce or eliminate import duties and value-added taxes. However, much as the new super-tall New York condos may serve that same general purpose, these are no works of art. If, as Goethe posited, architecture is frozen music, then these buildings are vertical money.
.. a property tax surcharge on nonprimary residences in New York City valued at $5 million and higher, which one study says could generate some $665 million to subsidize low- and middle-income housing. Predictably, the city’s powerful real estate industry—largely controlled by a few dozen family-owned firms, some with long-standing ties to politicians of both major parties—is up in arms over the idea, and thus the prospect of the bill’s being approved by one of the country’s more compromised state governments appears quite unlikely.
.. Yet not one of New York’s postmillennial claimants to that lineage possesses an iota of the aesthetic élan that distinguished those early skyscrapers, internationally renowned as America’s signal contribution to modern architectural form. Here one can point, for example, to the Woolworth, Chrysler, and Empire State buildings.
In contrast, the smokestack-like protuberances that now disrupt the skyline of midtown Manhattan signify the steadily widening worldwide gap between the unimaginably rich and the unconscionably poor. Those of us who believe that architecture invariably (and often unintentionally) embodies the values of the society that creates it ..