After living in NYC for a few years now, I continue to be amazed how the skyline still manages to change year after year with the addition of new major skyscrapers. For context, I have seen three of the top five tallest towers (Central Park Tower, Steinway Tower, One Vanderbilt) finish construction. I also developed a habit in looking up the architect for any major skyscraper that I would come across.
Given this fascination, I was curious in exploring more into the history of skyscraper construction in NYC and seeing which architects played a major role in developing this city. To answer this, I luckily stumbled upon Skyscraper Page which contains all the information I was interested in about a skyscraper which includes building name, address, construction year, number of floors, and architect. After webscraping all this information for each built skyscraper in NYC and following this with some necessary data cleaning, here are some of the observations I found from the figures I generated below from the dataset:
- The construction of NYC skyscrapers (total of ~6200) follows a bimodal distribution where we see that a good majority of these buildings were constructed in the 1920s and 1960s, which coincides with the construction booms during the Roaring Twenties and post-WWII, respectively
- The average number of floors of newly built skyscrapers noticeably jumps in the 1930s, from 16.6 in the 1920s to 20.3 floors, and then decreases significantly to 14.7 in the 1940s. Guess which iconic building may have contributed to this spike?
- Emery Roth & Sons is the clear leading architect in NYC by a significant margin, measured through the number of skyscrapers they designed (some notable buildings include the Metlife building and the El Dorado building by Central Park)
- Only five of the top twenty architects I considered for this analysis have a building that has been completed in the last 10 years (Kondylis, SLCE, SOM, Davis Brody Bond, Emery Roth & Sons), and all of these firms have been designing buildings in NYC for some time
- Newer skyscrapers tend to be taller, given the negative correlation between a skyscraper’s age and its height, which can be attributed to innovations in skyscraper technology. This was also foreshadowed by the previous figure where see the shift towards constructing taller buildings starting in the 1960s
- Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) tops the list when calculating the average height of buildings in one’s porfolio, which should come as no surprise if you’re familiar with the tallest skyscrapers in the world (SOM designed One World Trade Center, the tallest building in NYC)
What other interesting observations can you see? (For interactive versions of these figures, click here)