A Greek architect wants to twist up the famed New York City skyline with a building that will be not only amongst the world’s tallest— but also the world’s longest.
A firm called Oiio, run by Yiannis Oikonomou with offices in New York City and Athens has proposed The Big Bend, an inverted U-shaped structure that would twist in the sky, forever reshaping the skyline just south of Central Park, known as “Billionaire’s Row” and the entire cityscape.
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.
It all sounds like an interesting concept, right?
And that, it remains: a concept. It seems highly unlikely that a project like this would ever get off the ground.
The politicians, community leaders and preservation groups have already condemned the rise of supertall structures that are currently rising along Central Park South, so adding another one to the mix wouldn’t possibly go over well with them— especially one as radical as Oikonomou’s Big Bend.
GREEK WORLD MEDIA 