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Old Posted Apr 19, 2017, 3:17 PM
De Minimis NY De Minimis NY is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2013
Location: Hell's Kitchen, NY
Posts: 68
That spire looks like a bit of an afterthought to me, although I love the other updates in the render.

Spires typically work best when a building’s crown tapers towards them (e.g., Chrysler, Empire State, Bank of America, One Vanderbilt…), or at least where there are other architectural elements protruding from the roof to frame and create a visual transition into the spire (the fins on top of NY Times Building, or the steel boxes on top of 4 Times Square).

3 Hudson’s curtain wall does extend beyond the roofline, but those extensions are at angles that feel unrelated to the spire and that don’t do much in terms of framing or transitioning. The spirit of the building lies within its twisted form (which I love), but that feature seems at odds with plopping a single massive spire down the center. I think this one would look much better with four smaller spires to emphasize the parallelogrammatic form that the tower transitions towards as it rises… something which coincidentally would be appreciated by those of us still reeling from the value engineering at 3 WTC.

(As an aside, I think that the general rules about transitioning towards a spire don’t apply when the spire extends from the side rather than the center of a building, which is why CP Tower worked so well with a spire despite the blunt transition).
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