The Four Seasons Hotel is housed in a building that exudes the classic elegance of the past, with the comfortable amenities of the present, in Lower Manhattan.
It is difficult to find a building that possesses that classic, and desired, aroma of the past, when the work was more traditional and expensive, when each detail had to be visualized and explained with care so that no one strays. When solutions had to be improvised without possible rehearsals, since there was no time left, nor had anything similar been done before. When the valuable tools that we flaunt today were not possessed.
A luxury residential skyscraper in Manhattan
But in Manhattan, New York, we can find a building that fulfills this precept with singular joy. We are talking about a skyscraper forged to face One World Trade Center and show you its grim past. No floor-to-ceiling glass, no silver or gold metal trim, no reticular networks of modernity. This building looks as if it was conceived in the 60s of the last century: powerful, but kind.
Its name is Thirty Park Place, and it is located in Lower Manhattan, in the fashionable neighborhood called Tribeca. The promoters of Silverstein Properties moved there, who had to request a loan of 660 million dollars, 554 euros, for a construction that began in 2013 and ended in 2016.
It houses luxury apartments and the Four Seasons hotel
The marvelous tower was designed by Robert AM Stern Architects, a well-known architecture firm that has had its signature on some of the most exciting projects of this century. The building reaches 282.20 meters high, and is distributed over 82 floors, where 157 luxury residences and the Four Seasons New York Downtown hotel are sheltered. It has a whopping 189 rooms, whose price exceeds 700 euros per night.
But everything in life is not money, so the developers applied their best to offer the users of the skyscraper the best of the best. This includes a 23 meter long swimming pool with attached saunas, a luxury spa, a gym with a room for yoga, a special room for our children’s games, a double height conservatory with a piano and, of course, private dining room and catering to taste
An enviable piece of engineering
The company in charge of the structural engineering was WSP Cantor Seinuk, and he says that the slenderness ratio of the skyscraper is 1:10.5. The skyscraper was executed with a reinforced concrete structure, in a network supported by cores of this material in the center. This made it possible to take advantage of the stairwell and elevator shaft, and pillars on the perimeter, leaving all the space in between to freely configure the rooms.
The floors were made of reinforced concrete slabs with edges of 20 and 23 centimeters, supported by the other structural elements, walls and pillars. But things get interesting on the 24th floor, where the engineers established the placement of eight stabilizer walls, so that the building can well resist the loads generated by the wind. This made it necessary to create walls on the façade in order to better distribute the loads, in addition to having to execute pillars that were offset from the axis between floors at some points.
The facade is one of the main attractions of the skyscraper
But apart from the structure, we have to look at the limestone façade… Sorry, did I say limestone? Fake!! The façade is made of precast concrete, produced by the Canadian company BPDL Béton Préfabriqué. They say that the work consisted of the creation of 2018 prefabricated panel templates, many of them unique. Paneling had to be done at a fast pace, as a floor had to be finished every two days.
Luckily the Canadians devised an encapsulation system to lift the parts in the crane. This prevented the breaks that could occur during the hoisting of the loads. To prevent thermal bridges, as well as to avoid cracking due to tensions between different supports, the façade is not supported on the slabs directly, it is done through superimposed support elements.
Dare to live in the residential skyscraper of Manhattan
But if what you want to know is how much you have to save to buy one of these apartments, we are going to tell you. If you want one of mega luxury, you will have to go up to the 80th floor, where an apartment of 574 square meters awaits you at 32.5 million dollars, almost 29 euros. If you want something more «normal», we will go down to the 60th floor, where for almost 10 million dollars, 9 euros, you will get 260 square meters. Of course, the most «discreet» that you will find is on the 39th floor and it costs 1 million dollars, 8.9 euros. A small apartment that is only 46 square meters.
Of course, this fantastic skyscraper leaves no one unmoved, even when its location places it next to colossi such as One World, the classic Woolworth, a 1913 skyscraper, or the idolized New York by Gehry, by the famous architect. The finishes, the distribution of the houses, many of them with balconies, in addition to having a 24-hour doorman, parking and access to a private park, make it one more tourist attraction in the almighty New York.