255 West 34th Street
Update
03/22/22
Cantilevered Hotel Tower Rises in Midtown
The concrete superstructure is steadily growing taller for a 33-story tower project at 255 West 34th Street in Midtown. General contractor, , has so far built up to around the halfway point with roughly 10-15 floors left to form.
Developed by The Chetrit Group, the tower is planned to contain a hotel with rooms. This will target a wide range of travelers as the site is situated just a block away from Penn Station and Madison Square Garden.
The team at Architects is responsible for the building's design. Set to top out at feet tall, it will total square feet.
One of the structures' most distinct architectural features is a 20-foot cantilever, that begins about a third of the way up. This overhang section will actually suspend 20 of the uppermost floors over the roof of the building next door. Depending on who you ask, this is either a disaster in the making or a testament to the engineering team and the strength of the building.
Whether or not you love the idea of sleeping in a hotel room suspended in mid-air, this type of forward-thinking design may actually provide a practical solution to a slowly growing NYC problem. With an abundance of unused air rights in and around Manhattan, but space for new development becoming scarcer by the day, developers will soon have to find new ways to pack more square footage into smaller footprints. As a result, we could potentially start to see an increase in the popularity of large cantilevered structures like 255 West 34th within the coming years.
