ARCHITECTURE

lower end, then, the annual housing cost of $37,200—taken
as the maximum recommended one-third of gross income—sets
entry-level income for the building at around
$112,000 annually. 14 In 2014, the U.S. Census Bureau calculated
mean household income nationally at $51,939, putting
the lowest earners in the building at twice the national
mean, somewhere in the top 20 percent nationwide. 15
At the upper end, and at the top of the building, the four
penthouse units rented for around $25,000 per month,
or $300,000 annually, suggesting a minimum household
income of $900,000, which sits comfortably within the
top 1 percent of earners against whom the Occupy Wall
Street chants were directed. Calculated proportionately,
the average rent in the building in 2014 was approximately
$5,000 per month or $60,000 annually, suggesting a
household income of about $180,000. That would put at
least half of the residents in Gehry’s New York (i.e., New
York by Gehry) if not in “the 1%” then at least in the top 10
percent of earners nationwide. 15
However, the architecture of inequality is not
limited to calculations like those translated into stainless
steel and concrete at the higher end of the real estate market
by the Gehry team. It defines the multidimensional,
transnational “Wall Street” addressed by the Occupy protests,
where the market performance of New York by Gehry
contributed to an overall portfolio against which shares
in the developer’s parent company, Forest City Enterprises,
Inc., traded. In this respect, New York by Gehry was
not only shaped by capital; it is capital. That includes the
architecture, which factored into the development strategy
and financing from the beginning. This is nothing special.
While it may still be relatively unusual for a “star”
architect to be involved so intimately with the commercial
aspects of real estate development to the point of selling
his or her name, the commercial and investment value
of any building always includes its architectural characteristics,
even if those are as mundane as ceiling heights,
square footage, or finishes. And a building’s owners, be
they residents, developers, or shareholders, are increasingly
positioned on the scales of relative wealth based on
the value of that property, and of any other property they
own, rather than what they earn from their labor.
This latter point is among the central insights of
Thomas Piketty’s influential Capital in the Twenty-First
Century, which was published to international acclaim
in 2013, shortly after New York by Gehry, and the world
to which it belongs, came online. Strikingly, Piketty finds
inequality of capital (or wealth) increasing much more
rapidly than inequality of wages since the 1970s in Europe
and the United States. He begins with what we know:
[W]hat primarily characterizes the United States
at the moment is a record level of inequality of income
from labor (probably higher than in any other
society at any time in the past, anywhere in the
world, including societies in which skill disparities
were extremely large) together with a level of
inequality of wealth less extreme than the levels
observed in traditional societies or in Europe in
the period 1900–1910. It is therefore essential to
understand the conditions under which these two
logics could develop, while keeping in mind that
they may complement one another in the century
ahead and combine their effects. If this happens,
the future could hold in store a new world of inequality
more extreme than any that preceded it. 16
At present rates what Piketty describes as “high inequality”
in capital ownership, in which 10 percent of the population
owns 70 percent of the wealth, becomes within
about fifteen years, “very high inequality” in which the
top 10 percent owns 90 percent of the wealth. However,
102 103