Dive Brief:
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American pop icon Beyoncé was the muse for the architects at Elenberg Fraser who designed a curvy, 78-story skyscraper to be built in Melbourne, Australia — to resemble the fabric-bound bodies of the singer and two dancers in the star’s music video “Ghost.”
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The 740-foot-tall Premier Tower, a combined 660-apartment building and 160-room hotel, was created using a computer-aided design technique called “parametric modeling” that allows for bulges and curves in an otherwise slender facade.
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New York magazine noted that identifying Beyoncé in an artist’s rendering of the building is “like spotting the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast.” View the video that inspired the design here.
Dive Insight:
The Beyoncé-inspired building won’t be the world’s first to channel the body of an American icon: Ontario, Canada, is home to the Absolute Towers, a pair of sky-high residential condos designed to pay homage to the voluptuous shape of Marilyn Monroe.
That design, created by a Beijing-based architect, Ma Yansong, and his firm, MAD Architects, won a Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat award for Best Tall Buildings in the Americas in 2012.
