I find myself somewhere in between thinking this is wildly preposterous and remarkably impressive.
On one hand, a curved building is just not something we need. Time and intelligence could be way better spent, like, finally figuring out flying cars so we can defeat traffic once and for all. Sure, this building, uninspiringly called ‘The Big Bend,’ will look pretty sweet, but at the end of the day, it’s still just a building. Apartments, bathrooms, a doorman, couple elevators, a restaurant on bottom, and that’s it.
But on the other hand… just wow. Look at this thing. Dubai has been kind of taking the world by storm with their modern designs, so it would only make sense that it’s America who one-ups them and reminds the world who invented dope skylines.
In a bid to work around the challenges of the zoning laws in New York City, design studio Oiio created the concept to straddle across Billionaire’s Row on 57th Street.
Via Oiio:
There is an undeniable obsession that resides in Manhattan. It is undeniable because it is made to be seen. There are many different ways that can make a building stand out, but in order to do so the building has to literary stand out.
We have become familiar with building height measurements. We usually learn about the latest tallest building and we are always impressed by it’s price per square foot. It seems that a property’s height operates as a license for it to be expensive.
New York city’s zoning laws have created a peculiar set of tricks trough which developers try to maximize their property’s height in order to infuse it with the prestige of a high rise structure. But what if we substituted height with length? What if our buildings were long instead of tall?
If we manage to bend our structure instead of bending the zoning rules of New York we would be able to create one of the most prestigious buildings in Manhattan. The longest building in the world. The Big Bend can become a modest architectural solution to the height limitations of Manhattan. We can now provide our structures with the measurements that will make them stand out without worrying about the limits of the sky.
I’ve never understood mankind’s obsession with creating the world’s tallest building. The motto ‘the bigger you are, the harder you fall’ exists for a reason, folks. I can only imagine how much truer that will become once they start throwing U-shaped buildings in the middle of Manhattan.
