Extell Development made waves as when they announced their 1,004-foot-tall skyscraper One57 by Christian de Portzamparc on Midtown Manhattan’s 57th Street (which made headlines most recently for crane troubles during Hurricane Sandy), but their next project a few blocks down the street looks to climb even higher. Developers announced in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday that Chicago-based Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture will design an 88-story, 1,550-foot-tall tower on West 57th Street just east of Broadway, an area quickly becoming known for skinny skyscraper proposals.

Adrian Smith, a former design principal at SOM’s Chicago office, and Gordon Gill, a former design associate at SOM, are two of the leading authorities on supertall buildings, while at SOM and at their own practice. While at SOM, Smith was the designer of the world’s current tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. In more recent years, AS+GG has retrofitted Chicago’s Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower), designed the Quintai International Tower in China, the Dancing Dragons towers for Seoul, Korea’s Yongsan Business District and the Federation of Korean Industries Tower, and taken on what could be the world’s next tallest tower, the kilometer-high Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia.

AS+GG’s new tower for Extell, their first in Manhattan, will stand 300 feet above the Empire State Building and taller than the World Trade Center excluding its antenna. It will house the city’s first Nordstrom department store with a hotel and residences above. The architects were selected from a pool of top name architects including SHoP and Herzog & De Meuron, who both are already working on towers in New York City. Extell president Gary Barnett told the Journal that Seattle-based Nordstroms actually recommended AS+GG for the job.

No groundbreaking has been set and financing must first be secured, but the tower could be complete as soon as 2018.