Mission Creep
Last week, I zapped an editorial on my blog, Derelict Domain, tearing into the structural mess of the building at 235 East 42nd Street in New York City:
Tower of Babel
July 08, 2026
When Ambition Surpasses Structural Integrity
The news from 235 East 42nd Street is a cold slap in the face. It reminds every architect and engineer of one cold, hard truth: Failure ain't an option. Yet, as the steel columns buckle and the floors sag at the former Pfizer headquarters, it looks like in the rush to fix the housing crisis, that important rule got thrown out the window.
My reaction? Raw. Physical. A gut punch in the sheer magnitude of forces hanging in a moment of inertia on this scale. Like so many others in this town, I watched the Twin Towers go down on 9/11/2001. I saw the whole thing from a south-facing office on the 18th floor of 2 Union Square West. An architectural firm was on that floor back then. I also remember the sharp arguments back-and-forth as we watched them fall, how those buildings came down so "neatly," as if planned that way.
Architects plan for construction, not destruction. It was more than a shock. It was an existential threat. In the days after, the verdict came down: The fire from the fuel-loaded planes melted the vertical beams. That sent the mass of the floors above crashing down, a hammer-blow effect that took the lower floors of both towers out. The lesson: No structure, no matter how it's configured, can resist the effects of a deliberate attack.
With all this fresh in the air, I got to renewing the discussion about structure. Both the literal, physical kind, and the semantic kind. A competent architect never designs a building with redundancy, but for adequacy. Excess structure equals excess cost, which nobody wants. On the other hand, if the structure is insufficient, it doesn't pass permitting. It must be just so, neither too much, nor too little. You can't just erase structure from the new designs—like what seems to have happened on East 42nd Street. That's the line between Aesthetics and Engineering, Form and Function, that you can't cross.
Those in the field, and on the immediate fringe, get that aesthetic considerations overruled engineering necessity, compromised safety for scenery. Formal criteria beat-out functional needs. The building was originally designed as an office, not a habitat, priced per square foot. The new designers prioritized maxing-out Grand Vistas of the skyline over structural function. Sure, structural columns get in the way. But the aesthetic excuse can't override building standards, and that's exactly what happened here.
The First Cause of this disaster? Re-purposing a skyscraper for human residences.
Under the din of crisis management, if you listen closely, you'll hear the murmurs: "It was meant to help solve the housing crisis." That's where the structural connotations of homelessness kick in. The problem of homelessness has drifted from a social issue—a real structural problem of society—to a real estate issue. Now, it's all about first-time buyer's opportunity, property values, home prices, and mortgage rates. These are economic matters, buying and selling. Not structural. Not in the engineering sense, and not in the social, organizational sense of "structure."
235 East 42nd Street is to be faulted on both fronts: both the master plan, and the social pretensions of solving the "home sweet home" problem. The intended occupants were never intended to be the homeless, and were probably not first-time buyers, either. It was for the Elite celebrity Out-of-Towners looking for a convenient spot to crash while in town for the shows. The units were meant as investments, second homes, or to be rented and traded between speculators of that class. The developer is not some kind of a "working-class hero," and neither are the investors. Profit was always the incentive.
Why This Matters
Homelessness is not a problem of aesthetics—or appearances. It's a structural problem. A social problem. It's not a choice, like a preference on the menu, or a listing in the home buyers' guide. It's a necessity, forced. An unavoidable consequence, just like the failure of a building's structural integrity. Homelessness is the structural failure of a human life. The failure of social integration in society and the economy. A botched renovation, like the one at 235 East 42nd Street, is a lot like a homeless person. Both are derelicts. Ugly reminders that the system failed to prevent the collapse.