Time Warner Intends to Move to Planned Skyscraper at Hudson Yards

The company would move to an 80-story skyscraper to be built as part of the Hudson Yards project, at the rail yards at 10th Avenue and 33rd Street, once an industrial neighborhood of warehouses, factories and tenements.

If it is approved by Time Warner’s board this month, the deal will be a coup for Related Companies, the developer of the 26-acre Hudson Yards project as well as the Time Warner Center, which combines a hotel, condominiums, luxury retail and office space at Columbus Circle.

At the same time, an investment group led by Related is expected to pay Time Warner about $1.3 billion for the company’s space at the two-tower Time Warner Center complex. Under that agreement, Time Warner would lease its space at Columbus Circle for about five years, or until the new tower was completed. Related also plans to move its office to Hudson Yards from the Time Warner Center.

Time Warner’s brokers, Douglas Harmon and Amy Spies of Eastdil Secured, have lined up a second buyer for its current space in case the company is unable to complete a final agreement with the Related group.

“They’ve found a new home,” said one executive who had been briefed on the Time Warner deal but was not authorized to discuss it, “and they found a winner for the old home.”

In the West Side deal, Time Warner would buy more than half the space in the 2.4-million-square-foot Hudson Yards tower, presumably to be renamed Time Warner Center. Time Warner, which is in the process of spinning off its magazine portfolio, Time Inc., would move its executive suite to the new tower along with its HBO, Turner Networks, CNN and Warner Brothers holdings.

Executives involved in the deal were reluctant to discuss it because the final papers had not been signed. But word of the pending deal has been coursing through the real estate industry.

Earlier this year, Related started work on a 47-story office tower in Hudson Yards, at the northwest corner of 30th Street and 10th Avenue, which will be home to Coach, the luxury retailer; L’Oreal USA, the beauty products company; and SAP, the software company.

But it needed a corporate anchor for the second, larger tower to build the rest of the multiblock site on a platform over the rail yard between 10th and 11th Avenues. The new complex would comprise the two office towers, a glass-walled luxury mall between them, a cultural institution, a 72-story residential building and a 60-story mixed-use tower with a hotel, office space and condominiums at the top.

Related has been willing to sell its office space at cost to lure Time Warner, one of the few corporations in the market for new space, and get the rest of the complex under way. The developer expects to make money on the retail and residential portions of the project.

Related and its partner, Oxford Property Group, are now betting that Time Warner’s move to Hudson Yards will establish the area as a new commercial district, much the way the company transformed Columbus Circle when it moved there a decade ago.

Related is currently building a residential building nearby and closing on a separate parcel at 33rd Street and 11th Avenue. It also has the rights to build over the adjacent rail yard between 11th and 12th Avenues.

At the same time, Related expects that companies will leap at the chance to pay a premium for the old Time Warner office space at Columbus Circle, and presumably, the opportunity to put its own name on the high-profile complex.

But large companies have moved cautiously in the current market, making many developers squirm.

Jeffrey L. Bewkes, Time Warner’s chairman and chief executive, first signaled his plans in 2011 to consolidate the company’s operations in a modern, highly efficient, albeit less luxurious, tower by 2017, when many of the company’s leases expire.

Time Warner hired the brokerage firm Studley to look for a new home, touching off a frenzy among the city’s top developers, including Boston Properties, Extell Development and Brookfield Properties.

Tricky Ways to Pull Down a Skyscraper

But here in Tokyo, a cheek-by-jowl city with many outdated high-rises and tough recycling and environmental restrictions, Japanese companies are perfecting what might be called stealth demolition. Some tall buildings are dismantled from the top down, the work hidden by a moving scaffold, others from the bottom up, the entire structure being slowly jacked down.

At times the techniques seem to defy gravity, or at least common sense, for although the buildings appear intact, they slowly shrink. The methods, which make for a cleaner and quieter work site, may eventually find favor in New York and other cities as aging skyscrapers become obsolete and the best solution is to take them down and rebuild.

The latest Tokyo high-rise to get the stealth treatment is the Akasaka Prince Hotel, a 40-story tower with a distinctive saw-toothed facade overlooking one of the city’s bustling commercial districts. Since last fall, its steel and concrete innards have been torn apart, floor by floor, starting near the top, by hydraulic shears and other heavy equipment. The building has been shrinking by about two floors every 10 days; this month it will be gone, to be replaced by two new towers.

Hideki Ichihara, a manager with Taisei Corporation, which developed the system being used to tear down the hotel, said the technique had environmental benefits and allowed for more efficient separation of metal, concrete and other recyclable materials. Another advantage is visual: The vanishing building looks normal for as long as possible. “We want people not to really see the demolition work,” he said.

Mr. Ichihara was speaking in the bowels of the hotel on a late winter day while, about 250 feet above, workers were demolishing two floors, removing the exterior aluminum and glass, cutting up the steel beams and pulverizing the concrete slabs. But none of the work was visible to passers-by — the top four floors were shrouded in a scaffold that hung from the intact roof and was covered in panels that mimicked the facade.

When the two floors are gone, the roof and scaffold cap slowly descends, thanks to computer-controlled jacks on each of 15 temporary columns. Then the columns are lowered into new positions, and the workers start taking apart the next two floors.

The cap helps keep noise and dust down compared with more conventional methods of demolishing tall buildings, which involve erecting a scaffold all the way up and around the structure but leaving the top exposed. “All the work is inside the covered area,” Mr. Ichihara said. “The noise level is 20 decibels lower than the conventional way, and there’s 90 percent less dust leaving the area.”

Aside from the cap, though, the Taisei system is similar to other methods in that the structure is taken apart from the top down. Another Japanese company, Kajima Corporation, has developed a bottom-up approach, cutting a building’s steel columns at ground level and jacking the entire structure down as each floor is removed. Since all the demolition work is done on or near the ground, there is no need to place heavy equipment, or workers, at the top of the building.

“The idea is to keep the building as intact as possible,” said Ryo Mizutani, an official with Kajima, which in January finished demolishing a 24-story office tower, the Resona Maruha building, near the Imperial Gardens. Huge hydraulic jacks supported the building’s 40 columns, and workers cut 30 inches from each column, over and over, to allow the structure to be slowly lowered.

The Resona Maruha building was completed in 1978, the Akasaka Prince tower in 1982. Ordinarily, a building that is 30 or 40 years old should have many years of life left, if properly maintained. The Empire State Building, for example, is 82 and doing just fine after major renovation work.

But the Tokyo buildings fell victim to the vagaries of commercial real estate here, where high property values, changing design standards and other factors have conspired to create a bull market for demolition.

“There are many ways to renovate,” said Tsuyoshi Seike, an associate professor at the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Tokyo. “But with buildings in the middle of Tokyo, they think it’s better to demolish.” About a dozen high-rises have been torn down so far, Dr. Seike said.