Real Estate: Stretching the Skyline

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Prompted by the pressure of soaring land costs and the national appetite for prime locations, builders lately have been stretching the skyline of U.S. cities to new altitudes. From San Francisco to Boston, apartment and commercial projects are growing to an unprecedented size and complexity for their areas. In congested downtown Chicago, a 100-story hive of offices, stores, apartments, restaurants and parking space is climbing toward completion next year. For a few years, the $95 million John Hancock Center will be the world's second-tallest (1,107 ft.) building, after Manhattan's Empire State Building (102 stories and 1,250 ft.). Last week beneath the street level of Lower Manhattan, workmen were pouring 3-ft.-thick concrete foundations for the future champ, the Port of New York Authority's twin, 110-story World Trade Center towers (1,350 ft. high).

All three skyscrapers, the only 100-story structures abuilding anywhere, are the handiwork of a remarkable general contractor: Manhattan's Tishman Realty & Construction Co. Long prominent as a builder and manager of its own apartments and offices, Tishman has spread not only into building for others but into research and consulting, fields where few construction firms venture. Explains President Robert V. Tishman: "I got tired of seeing everybody else grabbing up our ideas—for nothing."

From Home to Office. Working with such blue-chip clients as Alcoa, Dow Chemical, U.S. Steel and U.S. Gypsum, Tishman researchers have devised such cost savers as movable wall panels for faster changes in floor plans, noise-stifling floor-assembly systems, prefabrication techniques for kitchen-bathroom cores used in slum rehabilitation. Having built $630 million worth of structures across the U.S.—everything from a Philadelphia industrial park to Los Angeles' Sheraton Wilshire Motor Inn—the company also has accumulated a salable store of insight into construction intricacies. For a consulting fee equal to 1% of the total cost, says Tishman, "we take an institution's project and handle it like our own." Among other things, that means spotting pitfalls that can range from wasteful structural methods to improperly designed floor areas.

Bob Tishman's grandfather started the business in 1898 by building and owning tenements in Lower Manhattan. Since Bob, 51, took command of the firm in 1962, he has sold all but two of the 21 rental-housing projects that the company built following World War II, including all its holdings in rent-controlled New York City. The emphasis now is on a different kind of operation. Today the company operates 23 large office buildings, mostly in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Cleveland; it owns more office space (5,775,000 sq. ft.) than the total available in Denver, Atlanta or Kansas City. The buildings win few prizes for design; architects still wisecrack that Tishman's aluminum-skinned skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue in mid-Manhattan is "the tin can that the Seagram Building came in." The company has $857 million worth of buildings going up, under contract or planned.