Books & the Arts
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June 16, 2025
Norman Foster’s 270 Park and the rise of the brand new workplace constructing.
The constructing’s dramatic and dazzling feats of structure make it seem as if it have been hovering above the road. However is {that a} good factor?
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270 Park Avenue in New York Metropolis.
(Spencer Platt / Getty photos)
This text seems within the
July/August 2025 situation.
One Sunday morning in Hong Kong, not lengthy earlier than the second in 1997 when Nice Britain handed its former colony again to China, I went for a run across the Peak, a towering hill that gives some much-needed inexperienced house in an unbelievably dense metropolis. Afterward, I meandered down towards the Star Ferry dock in Victoria Harbour and was startled by an eerie, unidentifiable sound. It was loud and high-pitched, like an unlimited flock of birds.
The sound saved getting louder as I approached the HSBC constructing, a landmark workplace tower, accomplished in 1986, that was well-known among the many architectural cognoscenti for showing to be produced from a completely totally different package of components than most buildings of the interval. The HSBC constructing was neither a clean glass field nor an train in postmodernism, festooned with imitation classical ornamentation. As a substitute, it had an Erector Set aesthetic, with an exoskeleton that appeared as if it had been painstakingly crafted by a 10-year-old boy. The constructing had been my introduction to its architect, Norman Foster, however I’d by no means fairly grasped its enchantment. What I encountered that day, nevertheless, would flip Foster right into a longtime hero of mine.
The 44-story constructing was a remarkably open construction with places of work lining each side of a full-height central atrium. The tower roosted atop an open-air, ground-level plaza, defending the house beneath it from Hong Kong’s sizzling solar and tropical downpours. Because it turned out, Sunday was the in the future off for the nannies and housekeepers of the town. Tons of, maybe 1000’s, of those individuals, freed for a day from childcare or home tasks, have been gathered within the out of doors house beneath the constructing to partake in communal picnics. The sound I’d heard was that of a large variety of girls speaking to one another roughly without delay. And the scene—one thing that no architect, even one as intelligent as Foster, might have anticipated or deliberate for—endeared the constructing to me endlessly.
For a decade or two after, I admired Foster’s output: his glass dome atop Berlin’s Reichstag, his Bilbao metro system (the glass-arched entryways to the stations are referred to domestically as “Fosteritos”), his London Metropolis Corridor, a type of glass snail shell with a spiraling inside pathway (Foster mentioned it “expresses the transparency of the democratic course of”). I particularly preferred his first constructing in New York, the Hearst Tower on West 57th Avenue. All of them deployed the usual approach of contemporary structure, the glass curtain wall, however in ways in which have been defiantly nonstandard.
The Hearst Tower, accomplished in 2005, sits above the writer’s Nineteen Twenties headquarters, six tales of Artwork Deco splendor topped with greater than 40 tales of glass-and-steel triangles. The wedding of outdated and new was without delay harmonious and startling, dismantling a long time of rule-making concerning the correct contextual therapy for a historic construction. The façade is an undulating array of diamonds in a metropolis of rectangles, shocking but additionally sensible. In accordance with the Foster web site, the triangular panels symbolize “a extremely environment friendly answer that makes use of 20 % much less metal than a conventionally framed construction.” My admiration solely grew after I discovered that Foster had labored carefully on a number of tasks with Buckminster Fuller, whose most well-known invention, the geodesic dome, was pushed by the concept that triangles are stronger and extra environment friendly than rectangles. The Hearst Tower, although alien to the New York skyline, was a welcome addition, as a result of it recommended that the previous and current might coexist in concord, like geological strata, and in addition recommended a tantalizing future, one wherein Fuller’s domes discovered their manner into mainstream use, albeit extruded into high-rise type.
Then my uncritical regard for Foster hit a roadblock. In 2008, he was employed by the New York Public Library to do radical reinvention of the principle analysis library, the monumental construction on Fifth Avenue with lions out entrance (now formally the Stephen A. Schwarzman Constructing). The NYPL meant to unload a few of its actual property, together with the common-or-garden Mid-Manhattan Library, housed within the former Arnold Constable division retailer throughout Fifth Avenue. The concept was to include a circulating library, one thing pleasant and engaging, right into a constructing that many discovered intimidating. What Foster proposed was a sleight-of-hand: He would take away the seven ranges of stacks that held some 2.5 million books (and in addition, not by the way, offered structural help for the large studying room on the constructing’s prime flooring) and change them with… a Fosterito, one in every of his signature glassy pavilions, which might home a circulating library.
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It was a kind of moments wherein it turns into clear {that a} starchitect’s bag of tips is probably not as deep as he might need thought it was. Or, alternately, that geniuses who’ve made their title with one large thought typically repeat it too many occasions. New Yorkers who cherished the Analysis Library, influential writers and students amongst them, signed petitions, filed lawsuits, and held demonstrations on the Fifth Avenue steps. The plan was lastly scrapped in 2014, partially as a result of a brand new NYPL president, Tony Marx, had arrived in 2011 and didn’t precisely love the idea he’d inherited from his predecessor, Paul LeClerc. Additionally, with the change in mayors in 2014 from Michael Bloomberg to Invoice de Blasio, the $150 million in funding earmarked for the undertaking dropped out of the town’s finances.
In the long run, the Foster plan was scrapped for a much less iconic however extra deft answer wherein the Dutch agency Mecanoo, headed by Francine Houben, artfully renovated each the Mid-Manhattan Library (topping it with Midtown’s first really public roof deck) and the Analysis Library, an answer that revered the 2 buildings and their numerous customers.
In the meantime, Foster’s apply grew into an immense enterprise known as Foster and Companions, with a majority of shares owned by a Canadian fairness agency, Hennick and Firm, and the remainder held by Foster and his household, together with greater than 200 members of the crew who work there. Foster and Companions has turn into a well-recognized presence in New York Metropolis: the Apple shops; an artwork gallery on the Bowery; and 425 Park, an workplace tower constructed on the bones of its mid-Twentieth-century predecessor. After I have a look at 425 Park, which makes use of Foster’s trademark triangles ornamentally, just like the fins on a classic Cadillac, I see a well-recognized story in structure: dazzling innovation that lapses right into a signature fashion.
Nearing completion just some blocks south is the most recent Manhattan workplace tower from Foster and Companions, the brand new company headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. The constructing, at 270 Park Avenue, is a 60-story workplace tower that replaces the financial institution’s earlier residence, a 52-story gray-glass rectangle that was initially constructed because the headquarters of Union Carbide. The primary 270 Park, accomplished in 1960, was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and was the type of mid-century glass field that exemplified postwar structure in Manhattan. When Union Carbide moved to the suburbs within the Nineteen Eighties, the constructing grew to become the headquarters for a collection of banks that ended with JPMorgan Chase, which ultimately outgrew it.
So when New York Metropolis established extra beneficiant zoning for East Midtown in 2017 to encourage the development of bigger, extra technically superior workplace towers, JPMorgan Chase leaped on the alternative. The financial institution’s outdated headquarters was stuffed with outdated methods and rigid flooring plans, however the brand new one would supply a panoply of enhancements. The press releases confer with “web zero operational emissions,” the “distinctive indoor air high quality” offered by state-of-the-art air flow methods, “versatile and collaborative house that may simply adapt to the way forward for work,” and many “good expertise.” The constructing would additionally embrace “a state-of-the-art well being and wellness heart” that includes, amongst different issues, “yoga/biking rooms, bodily remedy, medical providers, fashionable mom’s rooms and prayer and meditation areas.”
Most of all, the brand new constructing has room for 14,000 workplace staff—all respiration higher air and basking in wellness—whereas the outdated one was designed for 3,500. And if it seems that JPMorgan Chase doesn’t want fairly as a lot workplace house—if heat our bodies sometime give solution to AI—the brand new tower will surely be extra engaging than the outdated one to deep-pocketed tenants.
The upgrades, after all, didn’t forestall the plan to demolish the outdated Union Carbide constructing from changing into instantly controversial. One motive was that it was probably designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Natalie de Blois, one of many uncommon feminine architects working within the mid-Twentieth century; one other was that it could be the tallest workplace constructing ever to be deliberately demolished with a view to change it with a brand new and even taller one, which angered these involved with sustainability.
There was another excuse as properly. In my opinion, Park Avenue in Midtown is (or a minimum of needs to be thought of) a de facto historic district, the place the place a startling new type of structure took root in the US: a glassy Modernism made well-known by the Seagram Constructing and Lever Home and in addition by lots of their neighbors, together with the Union Carbide constructing. However just a few of those buildings have been ever landmarked—and Union Carbide was not amongst them—so little stood in the best way of JPMorgan Chase’s demolition plans.
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After I first encountered the brand new constructing, within the fall of 2021, my uncertainties concerning the undertaking solely grew. What I noticed the place a grey glass rectangle as soon as stood was an amazing hunk of steel that resembled a shipwreck. It took me a couple of minutes to understand that this wasn’t a damage, a lingering remnant of what had beforehand been there, however, as a substitute, the underpinnings of the brand new tower.
Now, because the constructing nears completion, I’m nonetheless unsure what to make of it. With huge beams unfold just like the ribs of a folding fan, the 80-foot-tall thingamajig simply above sidewalk degree is clearly the constructing’s most audacious design ingredient. The beams may very well be simply one other expression of Foster’s penchant for acute angles, however that’s not their major goal: They’re there to raise the occupiable house inside the constructing above the town’s infrastructure (particularly the practice tracks) beneath. In architect-converse, the gadget permits “the constructing to the touch the bottom evenly,” however there’s nothing particularly mild concerning the armature that holds the constructing aloft.
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Very similar to the HSBC tower in Hong Kong, 270 Park begins properly above road degree. However the HSBC constructing seems to hover effortlessly (maybe as a result of a lot of the inside is atrium), whereas 270 Park’s dramatic feat requires conspicuous structural muscle.
By jacking the entire constructing upward, the foyer turns into monumental, echoing that different levitating Foster tower in Hong Kong. However whereas I can envision the foyer of the brand new JPMorgan Chase mom ship as a wonderful gathering spot, a superlative public house, a rave ready to occur, that’s not, for sure, what it will likely be. I’m instructed by the media contact at JPMorgan Chase that the general public house will finish outdoors the foyer doorways. We will’t go in.
Above the road degree, extra muscle emerges: broad, largely rectilinear expanses of glass on the tower’s east and west sides. The grid-like façade is carved into sections by huge metal diamonds (that are maybe what’s holding the factor collectively). The angular shapes learn like a well-recognized Foster chorus, a subdued reference to that spectacular array of metal diamonds over at West 57th Avenue and Eighth Avenue, and a nod to the long-ago collaborations with Fuller. Perhaps they’ll mild up at evening; however then that is Park Avenue, not Occasions Sq..
Seemingly as a comfort, the financial institution’s press supplies make a lot of the added public areas outdoors the brand new constructing—“2.5 occasions extra ground-level out of doors house”—and, in equity, there’s a public plaza (in planner parlance, a POPS or Privately Owned Public Area) on the Madison Avenue aspect, one which inexplicably includes cladding the decrease part of the western façade with a layer of one thing resembling stone. However viewing this constructing because it nears completion, it happens to me that the dissatisfaction I’m feeling with it’s much less concerning the metamorphosis of my onetime architectural hero right into a dependable company servant and translator of energy into constructed type, and even the lack of a cherished instance of mid-century Modernism. (And, truthfully, it makes me completely happy that the financial institution I nonetheless consider as Chase Manhattan stays dedicated to preserving its headquarters right here.) However the factor that after made me a Foster fan was the generosity, intentional or in any other case, of that first constructing of his I encountered—one which appeared to welcome the general public in, a minimum of at sure occasions. And what I hold coming again to now could be this: There’s not plenty of generosity on the market in the intervening time. I can’t even get into my dentist’s unassuming constructing with out displaying my ID on the safety desk and sticking a badge to my jacket. Certainly, there’s little or no entry the general public can anticipate from a brand new workplace tower except, like One Vanderbilt or 30 Hudson Yards or the Empire State Constructing, it gives an commentary deck.
Openness is difficult to come back by in a post-9/11, post-Covid, more and more post-democracy world. Realistically, there’s no motive to anticipate the headquarters of one of many world’s largest banks to defy that pattern. But when it occurred as soon as, it might occur once more.
Karrie Jacobs
Karrie Jacobs is a veteran critic and observer of New York Metropolis’s structure and growth and a powerful advocate of conducting analysis by strolling round.
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