I posted an article on the 18th of last month on Gehry's Beekman tower and how he had utilized his "Digital Project" software to ensure that the design would come in under budget. Unfortunately, it seems that even his magic software can't save the tower from effects of the economic meltdown in the country right now.For the past week, rumors have continued to circulate that construction at the tower in the upper part of the Financial District is to be halted. The 76-story luxury rental building (with stores and a school in its base) had its signature steel facade delivered to the site at the beginning of the month with a lot of apparent activity seen around the area. So hearing that construction will be halted has taken everyone by surprise.
According to a spokesperson for developer Forest City Ratner, "Given the current economy, we are conducting a study to assess costs, risks and overall timing. Work is continuing on the building including on the school and we should have some conclusive answers shortly." Some of these assessments include having the building topout below its 36th floor and not the 40th.
Developers should really stop the horrid habit of chopping off projects halfway and leaving projects that they feel are products of a recession but are really monuments to their inefficiency. Didn't realize how much it would cost or have a contingency plan for if costs exceed the budget, which always happens anyway.
Image obtained from www.curbed.com
2 comments:
Here is an analysis I wrote of Digital Project a few weeks back.
Ultimately, with Gehry Technologies developing software that models in not just three dimensions but four (ie, in time), its inability to predict the freezing of the credit markets is analogous to the overall economic crisis. The algorithms that priced securities could not predict defaults on a massive scale that had never before occurred in the lifetime of these securities, which is why they were so inaccurately priced and rated. In a parallel fashion, the models for pricing the construction of the tower could account for many construction and supply-line contingencies but not for the unexpected possibility that the capital markets that provided the foundation for the whole enterprise would explode. Perhaps the best lesson to draw from this affair is that we should be less trusting of the "objective" abilities of modeling to price highly complex and contingent processes like building a skyscraper.
IMO, the question Gehry and FCR are facing right now, and perhaps the argument they're having with the financiers, is whether it's hugely wasteful to have built the first half of the building as if it were going to be twice as tall. How much value is embodied in that structure and would losing it be a huge mistake? It certainly wouldn't be the first time the lower part of a building was overbuilt in anticipation of it being much taller--and years down the road, few remember. My feeling is everyone will probably learn to live with the losses. Rather than seeing this as a monument to inefficiency, it should be seen as a monument to our ill-placed faith in "scientific" methods of achieving efficiency. And we should be asking the question "efficiency for whom?" Making the leap to 4D modeling qualitatively changes the goals of design, and maybe there's something to be said for the old ways of design, which were not so seamlessly integrated with the financial aspects of the process.
I guess you are right. No one could really have projected accurately the horrendous demise of our economy and its effects on the building construction industry.
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