Despite being subject to some of the most stringent zoning restrictions in the country, New York’s skyscrapers have always exhibited a wide range of formal fixations. First there were the prewar wedding cakes, glued to their zoning-prescribed envelopes. Surpassing them were the Miesian glass extrusions, which leveraged the so-called Plaza Bonus from the 1961 zoning resolution to trade bulk for height. Those towers in turn spurred a postmodern backlash in buildings like Philip Johnson’s cartoonish Sony Tower, with its famously broken pediment. Then, in the years after 9/11, came the shards of healing crystals, in the form of 1 Bryant Park and One World Trade Center. The shards have since evolved: there is whatever’s going on at Hudson Yards and, of course, the postrecession ultrathins, from whose sights and shadows none but their occupants can escape. To this generational tree we might add a new branch: the pixel building.
Since the late aughts, “pixelated” high-rises have proliferated in cities worldwide, and we have their architects to thank for the metaphor. In Ban…