Inspiration is often mystifying, but this is especially weird: the exterior of 432 Park Avenue, the new luxury condo tower and tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere, was inspired by a trash can. For a building that’s been panned by the media as “a genuine clunker,” the layup joke is almost too obvious.

To be fair, the wastebasket-turned-muse in question isn’t a ratty plastic bin, it’s an elegant metal example by Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops) designer Josef Hoffmann that now retails for $225. In a lecture last year, the building's architect, Rafael Viñoly, said that while “there are so many inspirations,” Hoffmann’s work in particular inspired the grid-like exterior of 432 Park. As originally reported by The Real Deal, at a more recent lecture in December, 432 Park Avenue’s developer Harry Macklowe echoed Viñoly, saying that the gridded pattern on the Hoffmann bin heavily influenced the cubic facade. Indeed, if you look at the two designs side by side, the design twinning is undeniable.

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432 Park Avenue is a supertall, a rising genre of skyscrapers that includes the 1,396-feet-tall Manhattan building, as well as other sky-high towers like 1 World Trade Center and the half-mile-tall Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Building a supertall comes with its own unique structural engineering challenges; in particular, architects have to manage vortex shedding, which is when wind whips around the building and causes it to quiver in mid-air. To support its slender, square frame, 432 Park Avenue has bigger columns at its base than on the upper floors. The gridded facade, Viñoly says in his talk, makes the building “read like a constant object.”

That a building with a $95 million penthouse could be inspired by a garbage can seems almost like a public relations flub, but it's not, and inspiration truly does come from all kinds of places. Unfortunately for Viñoly and Macklowe Properties, critics are already pillorying the $1.3 billion Park Avenue building for its poorly considered building plan that, with 104 units gobbling 400,000 square feet of space, makes it "a monument to the epic rise of the global super-wealthy." New York Mag critic Justin Davidson, who said the building resembles "stacked cubbyhole units," also asked: "Shouldn’t architects who reach for physical heights be extending themselves creatively, too?" Announcing that the structure was made in the image of a trash can could only invite more eyebrow-raising, not less.

It certainly makes you wonder what other household objects gave Viñoly the idea for his next New York City condo tower. A metal ruler, perhaps?