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A zine produced by members of ARCH 5602, Kean University School of Public Architecture
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A zine produced by members of ARCH 5602, Kean University School of Public Architecture
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Vol. 1
Letter from the Editor -
Davis Richardson
Reclaiming 432 Park Ave - Kamila Diaz Calderon
Ultrathin Worlds -
Anyi Liranzo-Payamps
Finance Over Function -
Jared Britton
The Housing Shepherd -
Kacper Kowal
Livestream Dystopia -
Jake Haenggi
VR Architecture -
Ryan Barbour
Metaverse Architecture -
Danny Gavino
From Fi-Fi to De-Fi -
Scott Gleason
Realistic or Reality? -
Stephan Argent
Dubaifying Saudi Arabia-
Rasha Labibidi
NEOM’s Sustainability Mirage - Andrew Lazarte
Living in the Model -
Bryan Tome
Planting the Illusion -
Lauren Taravella
Critical Regionalism -
Nolan Aucone
About
Order
CGZ-VOLNO1-ARCH5602-FA2025-E1
Reclaiming 432 Park Avenue
Reclaiming 432 Park Avenue
as a Vertical Harlem
Kamila Diaz Calderon
Standing at the corner of 57th Street and Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan, the architecture of the city dissolves in front of your eyes. The relentless concrete grid of Rafael Viñoly’s 432 Park Avenue rises 1,396 feet into the air. This is not simply a residential tower. It is a physical model of a specific economic era defined by the dominance of finance capitalism over the life of a city. This building is a symptom of a profound shift in the practice of architecture, an example of how the built environment is not primarily concerned with sheltering human life or fostering community but rather with the spatial storage of capital. 432 Park is a vertical bank vault, a silo for excess wealth of the Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWIs) who purchase its units not as homes, but as assets for their extensive global portfolio — an occasional hotel room that happens to appreciate over time. The 1% is buying an exponentially growing asset class, and most impactful of all, a place to hide money from taxation, regardless of if they sleep there a few nights a year or never step foot in the unit.
Drawing on Matthew Soules’ critique in Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin, 432 Park can be best understood as it is situated within the broader discourse of architecture’s complicity in global finance. If, as Soules argues, architecture has become a medium for financial speculation, then the architect becomes a direct participant in the production of urban inequality.1 The supertall and the ultrathin represent a crisis in architecture. The form, materiality, and program of these towers are driven not by the needs of a neighborhood but by the aesthetics of abstraction demanded by offshore capital, a global architecture that is by its very nature not of its place.
If architecture is to recover its social agency, then it must move from a space of complicity to one of radical speculation. This essay proposes to reclaim 432 Park Avenue. By viewing the supertall through the lens of resistance, adaptive reuse, and the framework of Black Urbanism, we can imagine a “Vertical Harlem”. We could take this monument of wealth and inequality and revolutionize it into a site of community power governed by Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and an economy of cooperation. This is a vision of vertical urbanism where the “pencil tower” is reprogrammed to support mixed-income and multigenerational housing, cultural production and celebration, and the messy, vital social exchange of the street, challenging the ideological verticality of wealth with a new architecture of redistribution.
To understand 432 Park, one must first understand the economic logic that gave birth to it. It is a logic that operates outside local supply and demand and is instead driven by the global flow of what Marx described as “fictitious capital.”2 Matthew Soules describes how finance capitalism transforms the built environment into a series of financial instruments, vessels for transactions. In this case, the luxury condominium becomes a “safety deposit box in the sky.”3 The value of the unit lies not in its utility as a dwelling, but in its ability to accrue value and act as a tax haven. The property tax system is structured in a way where the sale and/or market value of the luxury property is a fraction of the assessed value of the property — what actually gets taxed to ostensibly support the surrounding community.4 Soules explains that the NYC property tax system allows for UHNWIs to pay, reportedly, one hundredth of the average property tax rate in the country.5 This is particularly impactful to New York City since property taxes are the main source of tax revenue for the city.
This phenomenon creates what Soules calls “Ghost Cities” or “Zombie Urbanism,” where there is a distinct, somewhat eerie feeling of emptiness walking past these supertalls at any time of the day — but especially at night — standing in stark contrast to the hustle and bustle of midtown Manhattan. As dusk sets, the windows of 432 Park are rarely illuminated; nobody is home. Any sense of community, any credence of neighborhood has been completely stripped away. These are shell buildings owned by shell companies where the residents are fictitious legal entities, LLCs registered in exotic locations like the Cayman Islands, Curacao, or ... Delaware.
This detachment has profound consequences for the urban fabric and, in turn, creates a paradox where the most visible buildings in New York are the least alive. The owners aren’t walking the streets, shopping at the corner bodegas, using the subway. Their kids are not going to local schools. They have absolutely no participation in the social and civic friction that makes a city both frustrating and functional. These UHNWIs exist in a hermetically sealed loop of private jets, private drivers, and private elevators. The building is a vacuum, sucking value from the air rights of the surrounding city while contributing nothing to the urban life below. This is extractive urbanism, where the neighborhood is mined for its cultural capital and the value of its location adjacent to (and unobstructed views of) Central Park, yet the physical structure built to harvest that value is designed in contrast to the city itself.
The architecture reflects this contrast. The extreme slenderness ratio of 432 Park at 15:1 isn’t just an engineering flex, it’s a financial algorithm that maximizes profits while minimizing costs. The goal is to minimize the footprint (land cost) while maximizing the area and number of views (asset value), resulting in a typology that is anti-urban by design. This creates a “Ghost City” in the clouds, effectively a vertical gated community that relies on the infrastructure of New York City to validate its price tag despite actively rejecting the people who make the city run, contributing as little as possible to the funds that keep it alive.
The visual language of 432 Park: its extreme minimalism, its uniform grid, and its sheer repetition is often acclaimed by proponents as “pure” architecture. Through the lens of Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin, however, we can read this as the aesthetic of finance capitalism. Soules uses the metaphor of the “Iceberg” to describe the subterranean expansions of luxury homes capped by strict zoning limits, particularly in London, but the concept applies also to the ultrathin tower: the visible architecture is just the tip of a massive, submerged financial structure.
The design of 432 Park is calibrated for the investment portfolio. The square windows and lack of ornamentation on the load-bearing concrete facade speak to stability, permanence, and abstraction, qualities that are extremely important to investors seeking a safeguard against inflation. The “Starchitect” — in this case, Viñoly — plays a critical role in this ecosystem. The architect’s name itself functions as a brand label, like Birkin to Hermes’ luxury handbags, which validates the asset’s quality, exclusivity, and, of course, cost. The “Starchitect” is deployed to mask the predatory nature of the development, wrapping the raw accumulation of capital in a veneer of high culture and artistic merit.
Yet, the prioritization of asset aesthetics over habitability has led to significant functional failures. Plagued in the past by complaints of its sway and noise from wind vortexes, elevator malfunctions, and plumbing disasters, the concrete frame is now literally crumbling over the city, following reporting that the desired white admixture may have compromised the concrete mix’s design for stiffness supporting the impossible slenderness ratio. These are not merely construction defects; they are the result of pushing a typology to the limits of engineering in service of a financial algorithm.
The interior logic of the ultrathin tower, too, reveals its anti-urban nature. The floor plans are designed to isolate the user. In a typical floor at 432 Park, the elevator opens directly into a private foyer. There is no shared hallway, no chance encounter with a neighbor, no community. The architecture enforces a radical individualism that mirrors the ideology of neoliberal economics: the individual is sovereign, isolated, and completely disconnected from the collective.
The verticality of 432 Park represents a corruption of the urban promise of density. In Rem Koolhaas’ “Delirious New York”, the skyscraper is celebrated as a “social condenser”, a machine that intensifies human interaction and creates a “Culture of Congestion.”6 The skyscraper, in theory, creates new worlds within itself, layering different programs to spark innovation and social friction.
However, the ultrathin luxury tower operates the exact opposite, instead creating a “Culture of Isolation”. It is a vertical cul-de-sac. By stacking single-family mansions in the sky, the social exchange that makes city life vital is eliminated. This misuse of verticality poses the question: if we must build up to accommodate a growing population and prevent sprawl, how do we do so without hampering the community?
Defense of horizontal, low-rise neighborhoods is often framed as defense of human-scaled community. The street, the stoop, and the porch engender social vibrancy. As an increasingly unstable climate future approaches, we must prioritize density and the adaptive reuse of existing structures — even luxury supertalls — while designing strategies which engender the same social vibrancy we traditionally associate with thriving communities of working people. The problem with 432 Park is not that it is tall; the problem is that it is a privatization of the sky. It is a misuse of the vertical axis to escape the city rather than to extend it. A true “Vertical Urbanism” would not just stack units, it would stack the street, the school, the plaza, the library, the bodega, and the family BBQ. The section of the building would be treated with the same civic regard as the plan of the city. To reimagine the supertall, we must look at the tower not as a series of private vaults, but as a vertical neighborhood with its own public, cultural realm. We need to reclaim 432 Park as a “Vertical Harlem.”
Reclaiming
Despite its prestigious Park Avenue address, the tower sits along the mid-block of 57th Street between Madison and Park, roughly twenty minutes south of Harlem via the 4/5/6. Yet, ideologically and materially, it is worlds away. Harlem represents a history of collective struggle, cultural production and celebration, and resilience, often in the face of the very financial forces that create 432 Park. Proposing a “Vertical Harlem” is not proposing to move the neighborhood of Harlem to midtown but rather injecting the principles of Black Urbanism into a sterile shell of finance capitalism.Black Urbanism as a theoretical framework emphasizes community over privatization and isolation, adapting and living organically over the grid, and repair over extraction. Through her work with the Black Reconstruction Collective, V. Mitch McEwen proposes that in order to serve liberation, we reconstruct architecture itself. Black Urbanism is an urbanism born out of the necessity for survival of people and culture, where the stoop, the barbershop, the cookout, and the block party function as vital extensions of the living space. It is an architecture of getting by and making do with what you have that fosters deep social and cultural networks — networks that are entirely absent, and supposedly not needed, from the ultrathin and the ultrarich.
CLT in the sky
The first step in this radical reuse is a shift in ownership. This speculative proposal reimagines the acquisition of the tower by a Community Land Trust (CLT). Perhaps by a market crash that renders the “zombies” insolvent; or, more realistically, the developer goes bankrupt after they are forced to repair the myriad of issues, particularly regarding the concrete, and a CLT purchases the stake at pennies on the dollar. In this model, the land, and therefore the structure, is owned collectively by a non-profit trust to ensure its perpetual affordability, while individual units are cooperatively owned.This overthrows the financial model of the tower. Instead of a vehicle for storing capital, the building becomes a vehicle for building generational wealth for those historically excluded from it — specifically working-class Black and Brown families. The appreciation of the asset can be capped to maintain affordability, ensuring that the tower remains a resource for housing rather than a commodity for trade. We can imagine the stark concrete interiors softened by the aesthetics of lived experience: murals, plants, and other ad-hoc modifications.
The Block Party
With the spirit of the block party, we inhabit the grid of 432 Park. The rigid 10’x10’ windows and the clear span of the floor plan between envelope and core offer flexibility; the same open plan that appeals to the 1% can be extremely useful for the collective.For example, a multigenerational floor: Instead of one 8,000 square foot penthouse for a single oligarch, the floor plate can be divided into a co-living cluster. Multigenerational families share a central communal kitchen and dining space on the north, a communal living space on the south while maintaining private sleeping areas for up to 8, at the east and west. This mirrors the same kinship networks often found in marginalized communities, where extended families provide childcare and economic support.
A sky stoop where the open-air mechanical floors are currently underutilized can be established, transformed into community gardens and public gathering space. These would be public parks in the sky, accessible to all residents. They are the vertical equivalent of the street corner, spaces for recreation, play, and exchange.
Lastly, the lower floors currently reserved for luxury retail or silent lobbies are reprogrammed as spaces for cooperation. A vertical marketplace, artist studios, and daycare centers replace the concierge and the private wine cellar. The “amenities” are no longer private pools for the exclusive use of tenants, but community access like the local YMCA, including a swimming pool that hosts swimming lessons for local public schools and a gym that serves as a physical therapy center for the elderly.
This adaptive reuse is reparative. It acknowledges that the capital used to build luxury towers, like 432 Park, is often accumulated through the exploitation of labor and resources, often from the Global South and through the financialization of housing that displaces the marginalized. For example, CIM Group, one of the developers of 432 Park Ave has been accused of attempting to “flip” the entire West Adams neighborhood in Los Angeles — a historically Black and Latino community — to redevelop it into luxury retail, hotels, and offices.7 Additionally, they have been accused of evicting low-income families residing in the Southern Towers in Alexandria, VA which CIM acquired in 2020. Reclaiming 432 Park is an act of spatial justice. It forces an architecture of inequality to serve the victims of that same inequality.
“Vertical Harlem” challenges the idea that high-rise living is reserved for the wealthy or that worker housing must be relegated to the architectural margins. It asserts that the most prominent peaks of the skyline belong to the people who make the city run.
432 Park Avenue currently stands as a monument to a lack of architectural imagination under finance capitalism. It is a diagram of greed, extruded nearly 1,400 feet into the air. By designing these “icebergs” and “zombies,” architects have allowed their discipline to become a service industry for the hoarding of wealth, producing structures that are hostile to urban conditions. However, the physical permanence of architecture offers a unique opportunity for reclamation. While ideologies fade and markets crash, concrete and culture remain. “Vertical Harlem” is a manifesto for the afterlife of Billionaire’s Row. It proposes that we view the supertall not as a mistake to be demolished but as an asset to be seized, a resource to be redistributed.
This is not only an ethical position but a political one. Architecture must confront its complicity in financial abstraction by asserting its potential as a spatial representation of equity — a celebration of people. We must stop designing for the fictitious capital of the ultrathin and start designing for the messy, vibrant reality of community. To reclaim 432 Park is to reclaim the skyline itself, transforming it from a graph of rising inequality into a beacon of collective ownership and radical living. The future of the city does not lie in building higher bank vaults but in unlocking the vaults we have already built, inviting inside the city, its people, and their culture.
- Matthew Soules, Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, (2021), 13, 31-32
- Ibid., 25
- Ibid., 42
- Kriston Capps, “Why Billionaires Don’t Pay Property Taxes in New York,” Bloomberg, May 11, 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-11/why-billionaires-don-t-pay-property-taxes-in-new-york
- Soules, Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin, 128
- Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (Monacelli Press, 1997), 152
- `“CIM Group Is Flipping Los Angeles’ West Adams Neighborhood - Private Equity Stakeholder Project PESP,” Private Equity Stakeholder Project PESP, March 13, 2023, https://pestakeholder.org/news/cim-group-is-flipping-los-angeles-west-adams-neighborhood/#:~:text=While%20gentrification%20has%20existed%20for,within%20a%2010%2Dyear%20timeline.