She might not be headed for Brunswick, but it is looking like Beyoncé is going to be making Melbourne home sometime in the near future. Kind of.
Architecture firm Elenberg Fraser has recently gained approval for a new, 68 storey (read: 226-metre tall), multi-use skyscraper in Spencer Street. The Premiere Tower has been commissioned by Singaporean billionaire-slash-development tycoon Koh Wee Meng and his retail-offshoot Fragrance Group and is said to have been inspired by Bey’s Ghost video.
The Beyoncé Premier Tower will offer retail spaces, some 660 apartments and 160 hotel spaces, with its undulating curves actually designed to support the building and make it as practical as possible in terms of structure.
This project is the culmination of our significant research into how to best work with individual site and climatic constraints, brought together using our new parametric modeling techniques. The complex form — a vertical cantilever — is actually the most effective way to redistribute the building’s mass, giving the best results in terms of structural dispersion, frequency oscillation and wind requirements. Art and science? You betcha. For those more on the art than science side, we will reveal that the form does pay homage to something more aesthetic – we’re going to trust you’ve seen the music video for Beyoncé’s Ghost.
While you could probably see how the writhing, cloaked forms might have inspired the building, the entire thing just seems like a convenient comparison drawn in order to garner support to slap a skyscraper up in the CBD. Especially considering that the firm’s website only mentions the video once and doesn’t go much further than alluding to the fact that the building, like the figures in the video (and Beyoncé herself) have got curves.
Sure, its curvy and slinky and sleek, but they probably should have just stopped at: it gives “the best results in terms of structural dispersion, frequency oscillation and wind requirements” and just built her a statue or something for their next project.