Is the high life dream laid low?
THERE’S an apartment in New York at 432 Park Avenue which has been on the market for more than a year. It’s the penthouse and it’s available for £142million. It has six bedrooms and seven bathrooms. The sitting room is 93ft long and there are 360 degree views of, well, pretty much everything.
It’s on the 96th floor which makes it taller than most of the city’s skyscrapers. No balcony though, so I’ll not make an offer.
Some of the residents of the other apartments are unhappy. The building sways in the wind.
It has to otherwise it would snap in half. There are endless bangs, creaks and rattles and the noise of rubbish going down the chute is said to be like a bomb going off.
Living in a penthouse has long signified glamour and luxury.we bought into that modernist dream in the early 20th century as American cities built up and up and up.
In Britain after the war, back-to-back terraces that had served communities so well were demolished to make way for high-rise buildings and “streets in the sky”.the idea was that elevated walkways outside flats would be places where children would play and housewives would gossip, like they did down on the ground. But as we know, it didn’t work out like that. Instead, the walkways became places of menace rather than communal sociability.
My sensation in a high-rise flat is weirdly one of claustrophobia.
I feel trapped, even though the views are, as people always say, “to die for”. I don’t mind heights, I just couldn’t live like that.
In recent years we’ve seen far too many examples of how vulnerable tall buildings are. The twin towers of the World Trade
Center crumbled to ashes. Grenfell Tower was consumed by fire. The wrecked apartment buildings in Ukraine seem like such easy targets for Russian missiles.
Earlier this summer a luxury apartment block in Miami (Champlain Towers) collapsed, killing 98 people.
During Shanghai’s lengthy Covid lockdown thousands of residents were trapped in their skyscraper homes.
The promise of 20th-century modernism was tied up with a belief in technology which would always work and solve our problems. But if you live in a tower block and your elevator is broken that dream turns very sour.
Yet construction of high-rise buildings continues at an accelerating pace. In Moscow there are 12,000 high-rise towers, in Hong Kong nearly 8,000.
Living in the sky has become the preserve of the very poor and the very rich. Studies have found that living in a tower is bad for both physical and mental health. Though of course there are people who thrive in them.we’re all different.
But the penthouse on Park Avenue is proving hard to shift. A sign that the dream of the high life is dying?