By Jared Ebersole in Video 04 Sep 2026

Why 111 Murray Street Gets Wider as It Rises

The Tribeca tower expands above its 40th floor, making room for larger homes and sweeping views. Behind the glass, its structure tells a more intricate story.

Follow the edges of 111 Murray Street upward and something unexpected happens. The glass tower holds a relatively slender profile before opening outward near its summit. Where you might expect a skyscraper to narrow, this one grows broader, finishing in a crown that looks gently pulled toward the sky.

The change begins around the 40th floor. Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, the nearly 800-foot residential tower places additional floor space above neighboring rooftops, where apartments gain wider horizons. Its silhouette makes an architectural decision visible from the street: give the upper reaches more room. KPF’s project description explicitly connects the flare to larger floors and unobstructed views.

Where it is

111 Murray Street, Tribeca, Manhattan, New York City.

That shape invites an obvious question. How can a building become bigger as it gets farther from the ground? The answer involves carefully arranged concrete walls, cantilevered floors and columns positioned to preserve the views. It also requires setting aside an appealing misconception: a skyscraper does not have to taper to stand up.

A tower’s weight travels through its supporting structure to its foundations. The floor beneath an apartment is not simply carrying every apartment above it like a plate at the bottom of a stack. Columns and structural walls gather loads as they descend. Making upper floors wider changes what those elements must support, but it does not violate a basic rule of construction.

The real challenge is to provide the necessary strength without filling the best rooms with obstructions.

Architect Robert Whitlock described the planning logic in a March 2019 interview. Fisher Brothers and Witkoff wanted flexibility to accommodate different apartment sizes, culminating in large penthouses. An early hourglass scheme put too much area near the base. The eventual design kept smaller floors below and widened toward the top, from approximately 6,500 to 8,500 square feet per floor. Whitlock’s interview with CityRealty provides the figures and the design history.

Those dimensions represent an increase of roughly 31 percent. Spread through the upper portion, the expansion produces a gradual change in outline instead of a single conspicuous overhang. It also means the tower can accommodate different kinds of homes without repeating an identical floor plan from bottom to top.

The commercial ambition was clear by May 2018, when a roughly 7,500-square-foot penthouse occupying the marketed 63rd floor was being prepared for a $40 million listing. That was an asking price, not evidence of a completed sale. It nevertheless illustrates the scale of the product the upper floors were designed to accommodate. The Real Deal’s contemporary report identified Fisher Brothers, Witkoff and New Valley as the developers.

A single penthouse listing cannot establish how much every additional floor or better view is worth. Apartment size, layout and finishes also affect pricing. The architectural connection is more specific: expanding the building aloft created room for larger residences where the surrounding city falls away.

DeSimone, the structural engineer, describes a system using high-strength concrete, cantilevered slabs, a central core and wing walls. Crucially, its account identifies columns too. The lower 40 stories have four wing walls and four perimeter columns alongside the core. Above that zone, eight perimeter columns work with the core, and the wing walls fall away. DeSimone’s engineering account makes clear that the support arrangement changes with height.

A cantilever projects beyond its support, much like a balcony extending beyond a wall. Its unsupported edge can remain clear because forces return through the slab to the supporting structure. Increasing that projection increases demands on the slab and its connections. Concrete strength, reinforcement and control of bending all matter; extra floor area never arrives without structural consequences.

Here, the achievement is the placement of support. Whitlock explained that the curved corners allowed columns to be moved back into solid walls, leaving the northwest and southeast living rooms with broad, continuous outlooks. The distinction is essential: eliminating columns from a room’s view does not mean eliminating them from the building. His account of the interiors describes architecture and structure being developed together.

For residents, that coordination changes how a room feels. A corner normally marks an abrupt turn, often reinforced by a substantial vertical support. A curved glass edge allows the eye to follow the skyline around the room. The engineering becomes most successful where it is least conspicuous.

There was another complication beyond gravity. DeSimone reports that wind tunnel testing found redirected gusts associated with nearby One World Trade Center amplified the tower’s accelerations. Its response included a specified 570-ton tuned mass damper at the top, plus thicker slabs and walls to increase stiffness and mass. The concern was resident comfort. DeSimone shows how a neighboring skyscraper influenced the engineering of this one.

That detail gives the serene exterior a different significance. A tower must carry its apartments while also managing movement in a crowded skyline. The space around a building is part of its design problem, even when it lies well beyond the property line.

At street level, KPF brought the curved geometry down to a residential entrance and paired the tower with a landscaped public plaza containing a lawn, fountain and sculptures. The firm describes the building as mediating between Tribeca’s lower buildings and the World Trade Center district’s greater heights. KPF presents the ground and skyline as parts of the same composition.

Seen from below, the flare is a memorable flourish. Seen through its plans and structure, it becomes a precise arrangement of space, support and outlook. The wider crown is possible because the building’s engineers accounted for what it demands, leaving the residents to notice the view.