As Kimmelman notes in his review:
Most rental apartment towers end up vanilla-brick or glass nonentities, invisible at best. Not Via 57 West. No building redrew the city’s western skyline more ingeniously than Bjarke Ingels’s first completed project in New York: a warped, mountainous pyramid hugging the Hudson River at 57th Street. Already filmmakers have exploited it in “Doctor Strange.”
The shape is not a pyramid, actually, but a hyperbolic paraboloid, rectangular on the ground, with a swooping roof-facade, a bit like the billowed sail of a ship, sweeping upward from 12th Avenue to the mast’s peak at the northeast corner of the site, 467 feet high. Looking from 11th Avenue and 58th Street, the 32-story buil
ding resembles a spire. From elsewhere, it unfurls, its saw-toothed balconies, angled toward the Hudson, making hundreds of facets in the stainless-steel skin, which shimmer with the changing light.