The Spiral Turns a Manhattan Skyscraper Into a 1,000-Foot Garden

At the northern end of the High Line, the park’s greenery appears to make an improbable turn. Instead of stopping at West 34th Street, it climbs the façade of a glass skyscraper.

That illusion defines The Spiral, a 1,031-foot office tower designed by Bjarke Ingels Group for developer Tishman Speyer. Completed in 2023, the building contains roughly 2.85 million square feet across 65 stories, according to its executive architect, Adamson Associates.

Where it is

66 Hudson Boulevard, at West 34th Street and Tenth Avenue, Manhattan, New York

A park translated into a tower

The Spiral’s terraces rise around all four sides in a continuous sequence. Each floor opens onto outdoor space, while selected levels connect through double-height atriums and stairs. From a distance, the planted setbacks read as one green ribbon winding toward the roof.

The form is more than decorative. New York’s zoning envelope required setbacks, a familiar feature of the city’s historic towers. BIG turned those compulsory steps into occupied gardens, combining the silhouette of a setback skyscraper with the efficient floor plates expected from a modern office building.

Its relationship with the High Line is visual rather than literal. The public park ends nearby, while The Spiral’s terraces are amenities for building occupants. Still, their alignment makes the tower look like a vertical continuation of the landscape below.

Gardening against the wind

A garden at street level and a garden hundreds of feet above Manhattan do not experience the same climate. Wind exposure, sunlight, temperature and orientation change as the terraces climb. Soil depth and irrigation also become structural and maintenance questions rather than ordinary landscaping choices.

BIG’s landscape team therefore varied the planting by elevation and façade. The palette includes grasses and perennials at lower levels, climbing ivy and wisteria, shrubs, and trees such as birch and magnolia. Plants were selected for the particular light and wind conditions of their terraces instead of being repeated uniformly from bottom to top.

Rainwater overflowing from one tier can be collected by the building’s water-management system and reused in the landscaping. The result is less a single rooftop garden than a chain of distinct microclimates attached to an office tower.

What the greenery means for birds

The gardens also place habitat beside a large expanse of glass, creating a more complicated ecological story than the video’s neat reversal suggests.

Birds can mistake reflected vegetation and sky for open space. Transparent corners and glass barriers can create a similar illusion. Research has found that large window areas, nearby vegetation, migration and local bird abundance can all affect collision risk.

There is no publicly available monitoring study supporting the claim that The Spiral records fewer strikes than every comparable glass tower in New York. BIG says the terraces can welcome birds, bees and butterflies, but attracting wildlife is not itself proof that collisions have been prevented. Establishing that would require systematic surveys, comparisons with similar buildings and controls for missed carcasses.

The broader danger is well documented. A major peer-reviewed estimate placed annual U.S. bird deaths from building collisions between 365 million and 988 million. New York responded with Local Law 15 of 2020, which took effect on January 10, 2021. It requires bird-friendly materials in specified portions of new façades, including exterior walls up to 75 feet above grade and hazardous glass installations.

The Spiral remains a striking experiment in bringing planted space into the daily life of a high-rise. Its strongest lesson is not that trees automatically make glass safe. It is that a skyscraper can be designed as a stack of changing environments, each shaped by height, weather and orientation. The next challenge is making those environments legible and safe for the wildlife invited to visit them.

Sources

• Bjarke Ingels Group: The Spiral
• Adamson Associates: The Spiral
• Architectural Digest: Bjarke Ingels Alters New York City’s Skyline With The Spiral
• New York City Department of Buildings: Local Law 15 of 2020
• U.S. Geological Survey: Bird Window Collisions
• The Condor: Bird-building collisions in the United States