Tower Fifth feels like a glitch in the skyline
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Nice way of putting it. There’s been no shortage of ugly proposals over the years and Tower Fifth might be the single worst offender. May it never see the light of day (unless of course it’s completely reimagined).
I know 350 Park has taken some criticism for being too “safe,” especially compared to the first iteration, but I’d much prefer a skyline packed with relatively conservative supertalls like this than a bunch bizarre experiments like Tower Fifth.
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I think the Torch, in its latest iteration, absolutely takes the cake from Tower Fifth as the ugliest (former) proposal.
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262 5th is uglier than the Torch
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Good shout. It is heinous and thank god it isn’t taller, so it will be relatively obscured within the Time Square area.
hear hear!
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Say WHAT!? Tower Fifth is far worse than the buildings stated above. The fact that I copy and pasted the facade of 432 Park to make a rendering screams laziness. The most effort I had to do with the renderings was drawing the lines for the support and the escalators. The Torch is inspired by the arm of the Statue of Liberty…that’s fucking awesome to me. And I do like 262 Fifth, especially with the “tin foil effect” facade. I will say I am glad 262 got a height cut…and you can still see the Empire State Building from PLENTY of views
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I honestly quite liked the original design with its inverted spiral effect, but any architectural merit from that inspiration has since gone directly into the dumpster. The current iteration is a square platform on top of a stick, more like a temporary theme park structure than Liberty’s torch.
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I absolutely love the original design. Yet in the structural models you can tell it’s the value engineered design. As long as they light it up green with golden lighting on top, it still gets my personal approval. I’m eagerly watching the process wondering how the top will be constructed. I presume they’re going to top out the concrete core WELL above the current slabs, then add the presumed steel structure to form the top. Even though many oppose, you have to admit the future construction will be awesome and something we haven’t seen before
That was and is impressive to this day. But The Torch is structurally different. They’re gonna do nearly the same thing over 900 feet high. Impressive to me.
Also holy shit that photo was taken nearly a decade ago!
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The tower at the head of this topic will unfortunately not have any significantly designed structure since only a small portion of it straddles the GC trainshed, so it does not need to do all the “fanciful” maneuvering that was done at 270 PA.
The blue/red/gray structural model that is frequently shown for The Torch was of the original design, not the VE’ed opt.
Overall, to Arik’s point, the structure probably won’t be as spectactular as you’re making it out to be, it certainly won’t be anywhere nearly as intricate as 1 MW was, and will quite literally probably just be steel welded to some embeds coming off the core, remembering that the footprint of the torch massing itself is not that large, so the members framing it out will be quite small.
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I’m still looking forward to it, honestly. Its daring, like One Liberty Place from 1984-1987. Like I said, it has my personal approval. Also thank you for all of the information provided
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I’d call it more a disgusting lack of effort than daring. The box-on-a-stick preserves nothing from the architectural concept other than the cash grabs of the observation deck and drop rides.
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As it relates to the wind test model, I do find it relatively odd that they included Tower Fifth, since this tower was only somewhat recently revised downward in height to the 1413’ figure (which is what was tested in the wind model test), where as Tower Fifth has been gone for some time now.
And the ULURP process also finished long after Tower Fifth was “cancelled”, where this tower was still tall.
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Would y’all rather have a building inspired by the arm of the Statue of Liberty or a gimmicky Big Apple building? Oh god I gave developers an idea. Anyways back to 350 Park I guess
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They just kept it ever since testing 270P, OVB (photos of this setup appeared in the Thornton Tomasetti peer reviews of the two), can be just to present that something might rise there eventually - but this inclusion, probably affects the testing results of 350P…
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The inspiration is only worth as much as the execution. And Libeskind’s WTC masterplan was already inspired by Liberty’s torch, not that you can see it in today’s complex.
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Libeskind nailed that with his early designs before SOM made their design in 2005. Even the Comcast Technology Center in Philadelphia is slightly inspired by the arm of the Statue of Liberty. The lantern extends well above the roof of the tower and represents it clearly. Fun fact, One Liberty was inspired by the Chrysler Building (that should be pretty obvious) and the Bell Atlantic Tower (Three Logan Square) was inspired by how New York buildings were forced to step back in the 1920’s at the top like Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building
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