One corner of the Museum at The Times is devoted to Times Tower, a slender building in Times Square that was the headquarters of The New York Times from 1905 to 1913. (Much transformed, the building is known today as 1 Times Square.)
Eight snarling copper gargoyles ringed a cupola — called the Observatory — on the building’s rooftop. Two of those gargoyles were salvaged when Times Tower was remodeled in the 1960s. They wound up under a water tank at 229 West 43rd Street, where the newspaper was based from 1913 to 2007. After they were found, The Times gave one gargoyle to the New-York Historical Society and kept one for itself.
The Times’s gargoyle is now mounted on a wall near a four-foot-high model of Times Tower. Mysteriously, there were no gargoyles on the otherwise meticulously detailed model when it was donated to the museum in 2017 by the publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. So we asked Mika Gröndahl, a graphics and multimedia editor whose passion is model-making, to fashion thumbnail-sized reproductions.
First, he processed photos of the big gargoyle in the program RealityCapture. This yielded a proportionally correct digital base known as a point cloud. From that, Mr. Gröndahl derived polygons, representing the gargoyle’s surfaces, in the Autodesk Maya modeling program. He refined the polygons until the file could be sent to a three-dimensional printer, then airbrushed the hardened resin gargoyle printouts in a copper color. A dentist’s drill was used to install them on the cupola.
Making the cupola truly complete, Mr. Gröndahl used the Maya program to create an American flag with 45 stars, as many stars as there were states in 1905.
“The flagpole used to be an aluminum knitting needle that I ground to a tapered shape better suited to its new purpose,” Mr. Gröndahl said. From the original flagpole, an illuminated ball dropped one second after midnight on New Year’s Day 1908, the beginning of an annual tradition. With a little less ceremony, Mr. Gröndahl installed the refurbished cupola on May 9.
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