The World’s Thinnest Skyscraper Is Complete – And It Is So ‘Skinny’ It May Sway in the Air

With a height-to-width ratio of 24:1, Steinway Tower, an 84-story luxury apartment building in Manhattan, is officially the world’s thinnest skyscraper.

Steinway Tower is an architectural marvel. It is the third-tallest building in the Western Hemisphere after One World Trade Center (1,776 feet) and Central Park Tower (1,550 feet). It is the slenderest skyscraper in the world. It’s so thin that The Guardian newspaper has dubbed it “the coffee stirrer”.

Steinway Tower is constructed out of the world’s strongest concrete. As structural engineers, Rowan Williams Davis and Irwin told that a 1,000-foot-tall tower will sway from a few inches on a typical windy day to two feet on a rare 100-mile-per-hour wind day. The residents will not feel this movement.

These super-skinny skyscrapers are also called pencil towers. They first became popular in 1970s’ Hong Kong, but they are now becoming common in the US too.

In September of 2021, the tower’s condo board sued developers for failing “to properly design and build the building for its remarkable height,” which led to it causing “horrible and obtrusive noise and vibrations” in homes. None of that has been reported in Steinway Tower, though.

Studio apartments start at $7.75 million, while the triples penthouse at the top is priced at a staggering $66 million.

Steinway Tower may be too slender for a residential tower. Currently, the thinnest tower in the world is the 360 coastal observation tower in Brighton in the UK. It is only 3.9 meters in diameter, with a height-to-width ratio of over 40:1.