Your favorite developer?

I think I remember reading about that, it was the kids he had with his girlfriend and then ditched, right? What happened with the deal?

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I meant “small” as in firm size. Plenty of players doing big time projects (obviously less of volume) with big money but not the size of a Related/Hines.

L&L Holding Company is my personal favorite.  425 Park Avenue, TSX, redevelopment of Terminal Warehouse, and retail conversion at 195 Broadway are all spectacular projects.  200 Fifth Avenue was a wild success when the redeveloped it.  Smart, lean shop with great culture.

Before, I read his bio and it seemed pretty interesting how the financing all worked, going straight to shit and coming back. That being said, from the developments I remember, they don't all look that great imo, like the Peachtree Center in Atlanta and the Embarcadero Center in SF. He does make for some interesting stories though, like how JFK was on his way to see him in Dallas that day.

yeah, he was a huge icon in the industry, not sure how I feel about the firm/brand as a CBRE combined deal, but the legacy is legit 

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God doesn’t worry about returns, he operates on higher level, man.

He’s a bit of a bully sometimes. He tends to smite people when he doesn’t get his way. He operates on such a high level, that he’ll destroy the things he’s built, just cause he can! Imagine Related blowing up Hudson Yards because they felt like it. Dude blows up stars on the daily.

Definitely, I was just speaking with someone a few weeks ago from Marriott about their entry into the all-inclusive space, which certainly fits the hyper-lux standard. It'll be interesting to see how far they take it. 

The fact that they are just tall is definitely part of it, although I feel phrasing it like that is a bit reductivist. Erecting tall, slender objects is a very difficult task from an engineering perspective (in my opinion, it's one of the reasons humans have built and loved obelisks for millennia), and supertall skyscrapers are no different. I have an engineering background and find the tuned-mass dampers really cool and how they're used to counter wind forces and sway. Some of them can be really cool like in Taipei 101, others like the one in 432 Park Ave aren't as flashy (they just added mass to the upper columns and slabs) but are still interesting from a structural design perspective (like imagine trying to balance a column stack that is getting increasingly heavier as it goes up instead of the opposite). Just in general, being able to build something so tall fascinates me. 

Additionally, miscellaneous design features like the stilts of the 601 Lex (aka the Citigroup Center) and all the issues that surrounded that are pretty fascinating. 

Finally, I enjoy the architecture of tall buildings, some of my favorite buildings are One57, 432 Park, 550 Madison Ave, Transamerica Pyramid, and the Seagram Building. The tall buildings of Modernism are really the first major break from the historic architectural language of ornament, and I'd say most radical architectural movement since Perrault and the east façade of the Louvre in the 17th century. Single family homes like those of Mies van der Roe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson also represent the shift to Modernism, and I enjoy those too, but for commercial buildings the skyscraper is where the most forward ideas are embodied.