this is the spire of nyc's chrysler building, built in 1930, designed by noted architect william van alen, who said of the details: "the most extraordinary transformation was the evolution of the building's crown into a fantastic, terraced dome, an invention almost as allusive, bizarre, and sculpturally complex as a church finial by borromini. art and architecture reviewers in the 1930s noted that van alen's design was a "sort of cruciform groin vault sliced in seven concentric segments that mounted up one behind the other. the whole complex swelled upward toward the center, and as they did their shapes were progressively distorted from a pure semicircle at the bottom of the finial to a thin parabola that stretched toward the spire."
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