maintained all the way up and around which of course is very different. >> The architect behind the design is the late Raphael Vinioli, a man who was never afraid to go against the grain.
He’s the mind behind the Tokyo International Forum, the walkie-talkie in London, and the Batisy Power Station master plan. His legacy really does live on beyond him. And like many architects, he took inspiration from all walks of life. According to Vinoli and Mlo, part of the inspiration for 432 came from one of these, a trash can designed in 1905 by Austrian designer Joseph Hoffman.
And it bears a striking resemblance to the building. But what’s truly staggering are its dimensions. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I find you can get a bit desensitized to how big these buildings really are. We always hear that they’re x number of meters tall, x number of floors high. But to really show you just how ridiculous 432 Park Avenue is, I wanted to show you this.
This is a scale model of the building of 432 Park Avenue. The footprint is a perfect square. You can see it’s got perfectly square footprint. 28.5 m on all sides. Now, until 2020, 432 Park Avenue was the tallest residential building in the world, standing 425.5 m above the city with a ridiculous width to height ratio of 1:15.
To support a structure of that height, this skyscraper was built with two massive ultra strong concrete tubes, one inside the other. That inner tube is 9 m by 9 m of reinforced concrete that forms the walls. ranging in thickness from 300 mm at the top to 760 mm at the base. It’s the core of the building and also where you’re going to find the lifts and the stairs.
The outer tube acts as the tower’s frame. This is connected to the inner structure through spandrel beams at every 12th floor. Now, building like this makes a lot of sense when you’re catering to the mega rich. Removing the need for interior columns leaves those pricey apartments flushed with space. For example, 432’s penthouse has an impressive 8,255 square ft to play with.
>> I did sell uh one apartment for a little over $70 million in the building. It sits a top the city in many ways and you get a vantage point of this grand metropolis in a way that you can’t get from other apartments. It’s the whole floor. So, you get all 360° and in some ways it’s not a view. In some ways, it’s a seat at a show.
>> Now, if you’re a regular viewer of the B1M, you’ll know what I’m going to talk about next. Any building this tool is going to be subjected to wind loads and has to design around them. A building’s class as being sensitive to wind loads when it has a width to height ratio of 1:5.
But as we know, 432s is three times that at 1:15. Now, because of its small footprint in comparison to its very, very high height, any winds hitting the top of the tower could potentially cause it to rock back and forth. Early testing by RWDI showed that even in low winds, this thing would suffer from something called vortex shedding.
That’s where the air forces swirl around the building, causing vibration. And that can lead to a few things. some pretty frustrating noise problems, motion sickness, and more seriously, potential structural damage. To tackle that, they built five mechanical floors, each stretching over two levels, spaced out all the way up the building.
In theory, those mechanical floors act as brakes for the wind. They create openings across the height of the tower where wind can pass through. That does two things. It prevents it being forced down to the ground and causing issues at street level, but also reduces the loads at the top. It prevents the forces from being able to hammer the top of the structure too hard.
But even that was deemed not to be enough here. So they invested in something called a tuned mass damper at the very top of the tower. Now for those of you that don’t know, in basic terms, a tuned mass damper or TMD is a massive device that swings to level out the movement of a building. But 432 needed more than your ordinary damper. To match the movement of a skyscraper this tall and thin, you need a gigantic pendulum weighing more than a thousand tons and measuring 37 m long.
To do that, eight stories of space would have to be sacrificed and made inaccessible. And that just wasn’t going to fly. So, the answer was to split this enormous mechanism in half with each piece going into a narrow corridor on either side of the tower’s core, working a bit like an opposed pendulum. The new design fits within three stories and allows the dampers to travel up to a whopping 136 in in any direction with the aim of controlling the building’s sway.
Of course, once 432’s doors opened, the engineering became an afterthought, drowned out by the much bigger debate around its impact on the skyline. It was launched in 2015 with a very bold marketing plan. instead of, you know, filming some boring video that shows off, you know, the bathtubs and the crystal chandeliers and the swimming pool and the amenities, he did something really unique, which was spending a million dollars to hire an Emmy nominated film crew to film a marketing video for 432 Park.
And it included the highwire artist Philip Petite who’s known for walking between the World Trade Center towers in the 70s. Uh highwire walking from the Empire State Building, the 432 Park. It was very abstract. It was very artful. It had almost nothing to do with the units in the building, but it caused a lot of uh ripples in the New York market.
Everyone was talking about it. If you want to watch that video, then I’m afraid we’ve got bad news for you. It was literally only shown to prospective buyers at the launch with brief clips dotted online. By 2014, 50% of the building’s units had already been sold for a collective $1 billion.
That figure jumped to 90% in 2015. It was official. With 432 Park Avenue’s apartments proving popular, the cheapest of which still cost more than a million dollars. By the way, the mega rich had signed up in droves to grab one of these exclusive homes. 432 was hailed as the pinnacle of luxury living. But that perception was about to change.
The building’s board, acting on behalf of residents and commercial units owners, filed a lawsuit against the developers, Harry Mlo and CIM Group, and they didn’t hold back. Construction defect lawsuits are a dime a dozen in New York and you see them happen particularly in prominent towers, but off the billionaires row generation of super tall towers, this has had the worst of it.
Like this is the most dramatic, painful litigation that has happened at a project and buyers at this building seem to be particularly unhappy. It’s quite long, but I think it’s useful context to share this quote from page three of the 43page complaint letter. This case presents one of the worst examples of sponsor malfeasants in the development of a luxury condominium in the history of New York City.
What was promised as one of the finest condominiums in the city was instead delivered riddled with over 1,500 identified construction and design defects to the common elements of the building alone. And the sponsor’s response to these defects has been equally atrocious. Ouch. So, what do they want? Well, $125 million in compensation.
On top of accusations, developers shook responsibility and looked to push the financial burden onto residents. The board claimed unit owners were facing the following. First, horrible and obtrusive noise and vibrations. It’s even stated in the complaint that the chairman of CIM group, Richard Resler, admitted to residents that the sound of vibration issues were intolerable.
Second, they complained of faulty elevators repeatedly shutting down and trapping residents for hours at a time. And third, severe flooding and widespread water damage and claims that use of the trash shoot sounded like a bomb going off. You see, new buildings, especially at this height, are almost expected to experience a few issues.
But some have claimed New York developers in particular have a bit of a reputation. >> Developers who build condominiums are kind of incentivized to cut corners a little bit because once you sell the unit, it’s off your books. As long as you’re able to get the product, the inventory off your shelves fast enough, you don’t have to worry.
It’s the next guy’s problem. >> So, has 432 Park Avenue fallen over? No. Does that mean it’s a great place to live? Not necessarily. You see, buildings this tool can run into any number of issues like the wind which we mentioned earlier. All skyscrapers go through testing, but that testing doesn’t guarantee positive results.
In practice, swaying can leave a skyscraper with more than motion sick residents. It can also really hamper the lift shafts. A tall slender tower can fall victim to a stack effect where air friction deep inside the lift shafts causes a lot of noise. Also, the sway of the building can cause uneven force distribution on the lift cables, and that can result in defects, malfunction, damage, and in the worst cases, people being trapped inside.
Now, a bit earlier in the timeline, the Cavalier Raphael Vignoli spoke probably a little bit too candidly at a public event about the project. While stating he thought it was a good building, he also shared some choice words, which he later apologized for. And so that did not go down well when it was reported in the press.
But it just kind of goes to show you the tugofwar that Vignoli and Mlo had during the course of the project. You know, Mlo is one of those developers that sort of thinks he’s the architect as well. Um, and so there was a real, you know, push and pull between the two of them over all the design choices. >> Of course, the developers shot back at the lawsuit with a series of denials.
They called it ill-advised, describing 432 as a treasure. In their response, they said the tower contained a sophisticated symphony of systems that needed to be fine-tuned when residents began to move into the building. They claims to be carrying out work to improve 432 and looked to do more, but were denied access to their own building by the board.
That’s all while, according to the developers, the board was manufacturing an everinccreasing list of demands. And actually, reports suggest that the lawsuit may not have been backed wholesale. We do know that not every resident of the building was on board. Harry Mlo described filing this lawsuit as a scorpion biting its own back because the residents of this building or the the condo board was undermining the values of their unit so significantly that it was sort of unbelievable that they were doing so.
Four years later and this lawsuit still rumbles on, slowly grinding its way through the courts and it doesn’t seem like there’s much light at the end of the tunnel. As of last year, uh it was public record that they had recorded more than 45 days of deposition testimony and that the case had produced more than 4 million pages of documentation.
>> There’s a scene in The Godfather where one of the hitman is talking about Michael Corleone and he denies that he’s ever met Michael Corleone, etc., He says, >> “Yeah, a buffer. The family had a lot of buffers.” >> It’s kind of what happens here as well. You have a developer, you have a GC, which I believe is lend lease, you have a subcontractor, you have all the trades that do various subcontracting things, and then the developer has that LLC at the at the very top, right? So, who bears the blame for things like this?
It’s going to be a a fingerpointing exercise that could take years. What’s crazy is that it’s taken so long that a whole new lawsuit has been launched this year. Once again, it’s coming from the board of 432 on behalf of residents. This time alleging a deliberate and far-reaching fraud by the developers.
It’s looking to land more than $160 million in compensation. The 46-page court filing claims the building’s facade is plagued with thousands of severe cracks and deterioration, leading to flooding and corrosion. Worse, the complaint suggests the developers knew 432’s facade was defective and would never hold up unless expensive remediation measures were taken.
The owners of 432 claimed that rather than take action, developers fired every consultant that warned of the problems and hid the defects from apartment owners with the aim of securing massive profits and leaving the board holding the bag. It’s just the latest twist in this ever evolving story. And at the time of publishing this video, the defendants have denied the claims and moved to dismiss the complaint.
Oh, to be a developer in New York. So, you might be wondering if all of this has impacted sales. Well, while it’s reported that 432 did see a dip in sale prices since these lawsuits began, people are still buying apartments there. And once the lawsuits are finally out of the way, any fury about this building will likely settle down a bit, too.
The question is, can we call 432 Park Avenue a success? I will say that 432 Park is without a shadow of a doubt a huge financial success for the developers. Did gang busters straight out of the gate. Things slowed down later, but ultimately that building was extremely successful and bagged a lot of major buyers. >> We know the apartments here were popular.
The projected sellout of the whole building was $3.1 billion. That’s a huge return. And according to Maclo, CIM made a cool $900 million in profits. The financial results are clear to see. And love it or loathe it, this is one of the most famous condominiums anywhere on the planet. It’s faced a variety of scathing claims regarding structural problems, and its court battle is far from over.
But when you zoom out a bit, it’s not the first skyscraper in the city to face a lawsuit, and most definitely won’t be the last. The fact is this skyscraper isn’t going anywhere. It’s now part of a New York time capsule of super slender pencil thin towers around Billionaire’s Row. Just like the art deco designs of the 1920s and then the glitz of the 1980s, these towers are a reflection of their time.
And I talk about it in those terms because it now feels like that era, that era of super tall buildings around Bin Row has come to an end. Initiatives like the city of yes are giving power back to working-class New Yorkers, mandating 20% of dwelling units in highdensity areas have to be affordable.
I think it’s fair to say this is a highdensity area. In a city like New York, where one in four people can’t afford the essentials and housing costs a fortune, that’s great news for the average person. But it’s not so good for developers looking to make profits from super luxurious apartments. But Manhattan will always be synonymous with luxury, and 432’s stamp on the city is secured.
It’s faced more headlines than many of its peers, and time has yet to tell when it will be free of the turmoil. What we do know is that it unapologetically stands out in one of the world’s most iconic skylines. It’s bold and controversial. And doesn’t that make it a true New Yorker? [Music]
