CONCLUSION

FXC’s Snyder speculates that if a residential building boom lies ahead, several factors could contribute to a resurgent popularity of structural steel. With steel planking systems, “the erection tolerance is something where, if we need to get tighter with that, steel can provide a certain level of precision that you don’t necessarily always find in concrete. There may be a moment when the labor market changes and that’s more of a factor. The precision of certain prefabricated elements needing to be put into place [is] something where it may make sense to work with steel. There may be a cultural change where building height is no longer considered such a constraint,” if the severity of the housing crisis comes to outweigh antipathy to shadows by community spokespersons. “Maybe as my generation and younger are looking for housing, they’re going to be more willing to accept building height than our previous generation. We might start to have cities that are taller, that embrace height again, in which case some of the benefits that steel provides really make a lot of sense.

“We’re also becoming culturally much more sensitive about carbon footprint and the recyclability of materials,” Snyder continues. “As we think about some of the challenges of purpose-built office buildings of the 1950s and 60s that were so rigidly built to only work as offices—and it’s such a challenge to turn them into residences—we are starting to think about buildings more flexibly,” accommodating multiple programs so that a building “may have to almost be built more like a Lego set, where you imagine that you could build some part of it now and add further components to it later or take further components off.” The accommodation to hybrid work during COVID and the loosening of certain regulations proposed by New York’s City of Yes for Housing Opportunity initiative, he notes, both indicate that “we’re thinking more fluidly about program, and we’re learning to live in different kinds of spaces... So there’s cultural and regulatory and technological and climatological changes that are all taking place. It certainly seems to be a moment where we should not just be doing things the way we’ve always done them before.”

At the urban-planning level, Snyder sees a potential tipping point in various cities’ embrace of transit-oriented development—or, as FXC prefers to conceive it, transit-integrated development—as a strategy for not only replacing auto-dependent sprawl patterns with higher density but placing residences closer to workplaces, retail, schools, and new open-space street networks as well as transit. Near Metro North stations in the Bronx and New Rochelle, N.Y., the subway system in New York City, and the expanding Metro system in Washington, DC, along with its metropolitan region from Fairfax County, Va., to Bethesda, Md., FXC is working on higher-density residential development including multiuse buildings; “we’ve had some newer projects there that are much higher density, sometimes integrated with the transit station.” Steel decking at Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, Sunnyside Yards in Queens, and Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Yards, he adds, allows residential construction directly above transit infrastructure. Residential/institutional hybrids (including the schools that serve residents of newly densified urban centers) and other mixed-use buildings use structural steel as programs and load transfers require.

The housing crisis, as crises often do, is creating conditions that call for a departure from past practices. As the design and construction professions respond to the intertwined problems of housing tomorrow’s population, structural steel is certain to be part of the solution.

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Bill Millard is a New York-based journalist who has contributed to Architectural Record, The Architect’s Newspaper, Oculus, Architect, Annals of Emergency Medicine, OMA’s Content, and other publications.