I love this thing, sorry haters.
One of the things people say they hate about contemporary architecture is how it lacks a sense of place. The same handful of mega architects are designing buildings that could just as easily be in Dubai or Shanghai or Kuala Lumpur.
This building could only exist in New York. Most super tall buildings are office buildings. An office building needs to get a lot of people up to their office around 9am and a lot of people out at roughly 5pm. They need a lot of elevators to accommodate the rush of people and the density of a modern open office floor plan.
Residential buildings have a lot fewer people people per floor and they generally don’t all need to move at the same time as much. Residential buildings need fewer elevators so they can be much skinner than any office building.
But just because you can build skinny doesn’t mean that it always makes sense to. Residential only super talks in places like Dubai tend to have proportions much closer to a traditional office building. Skinny buildings come with their own unique set of issues that make them harder and more expensive to build, so you only build one if you have a reason to. In a place like Dubai where land is relatively cheap compared to NYC, there is no need to build a super skinny tower. New Yorker developers have the incentives to build towers on smaller pieces of land that would never get a super tall in other cities.