Maximum building height

Maximum building height is the hard ceiling a contextual district places on how tall a building may rise, measured as the rules prescribe. It is the closing move of the contextual recipe — street wall within the base-height band, then a required setback, then the cap — and it is what makes contextual massing mostly arithmetic: the envelope's top is a number, not a geometry exercise.

The device contrasts with the sky exposure plane, which limits height by sloped geometry rather than a single figure, and with tower regulations, which discipline the tallest districts by lot coverage instead of a cap. Which of the three regimes governs a lot is a first-order fact for any buildability analysis.