price is too much for that, forget it. the taxes alone would be crazy.
You're right: I wouldn't pay 50k for that place, let alone 5 mil.
It's funny, how some houses seem to belong in the place where they're built, and others seem like an architect's bad dream, as if they're 1% carpentry and 99% hype. This one, IMHO, is definitely in the later category.
This brings up another subject: one of the things that the Internet is/will affect is housing patterns: as electronic communication becomes ubiquitous, and a new generation of managers who grew up with iphones and apps and "always on" connectivity and call centers in Mumbai come to positions of authority, they will abandon the old world paradigm of "warm body" management and (finally!) start to judge their subordinates by results instead of appearances.
Of course, that's neither here nor there, but the change will mean that lower-level employees will be able to perform their jobs without showing up in a city just to make their bosses feel like they are productive because their bodies are nearby and still warm. Ergo, hyper-expensive and hyper-hyped real estate will become the exception instead of the norm: the minions who used to trek into the city to keep the machinery of American bureaucracy spinning will be able to do their jobs with video conferences, mobile phones, and fiber-optic cables.
In other words, Armstrong's tower will, at long last, serve as a monument to an engineer's genius instead of to the paper-and-inkwell past that so many managers cling to as if it were their path to salvation.
FWIW. YMMV.
Bill, W1AC
