‘People thought it looked like a sewer pipe’: The Sky Tower’s creator

Gordon Moller came up with the idea for the Sky Tower while drinking wine on a flight back from Toronto, The Spinoff reveals. He went on to create the building that rose to define a city. “I was familiar with towers around the world,” Moller says. “A lot of them were pretty ugly. If you’re going to create a tower… I felt it had to be beautiful.” But he faced a lot of flack for his ideas. “People hated it. People thought it looked like a sewer pipe. [They said] it was intruding on the landscape.” Now, the Sky Tower has come to define Auckland city’s skyline.