JP Morgan Chase’s new home is exquisitely detailed throughout but sacrifices the quality of the public realm in pursuit of corporate supersizing, writes Chris Fogarty of Fogarty Finger
New York City’s greatest urban design masterpiece is, of course, its grid. With its non-hierarchic, Cartesian logic laid relentlessly across Manhattan’s terrain, it spread northwards from the island’s original Dutch settlement around Wall Street, extending across farms, rocks and swamps alike. Uncompromising in its simplicity, it eventually encompassed the whole island. The City Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 still defines the city today.
The plan has proved remarkably resilient, absorbing more than 215 years of development without losing its underlying order. Laid out on a 200x400ft grid of blocks, with 155 narrow east-west streets and 12 wider north-south avenues, it was originally designed when the city’s tallest structures were church spires and most buildings rose no higher than three to four stories. Those same blocks have since absorbed both the birth of the skyscraper and the blight of gridlock.
Along the way, the city has repeatedly had to regulate its own success. One building in particular triggered New York’s first zoning laws. Completed in 1915, 120 Broadway, near Wall Street, was the world’s largest office building – 42 stories, 538ft tall, and occupying an entire city block. Most alarming at the time was that it rose straight from the property line with no setbacks, plunging the surrounding streets into almost constant shadow.
The response came just a year later. In 1916, New York adopted the nation’s first comprehensive zoning ordinance. One of its most enduring legacies was the wedding-cake daylight setback requirement for tall buildings, a rule that shaped the city’s skyline for decades and found its greatest expression in landmarks such as the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. At the same time the Rockefeller Center demonstrated how generous public space and commercial development could reinforce one another.
After the Second World War, zoning evolved again to accommodate the new generation of modernist towers, led by Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building on Park Avenue. Towers were pulled back from the street behind generous public plazas, exchanging additional height and floor area for a richer public realm at ground level.
In the last decade, pencil-thin supertall condominium towers have risen along Central Park, their heights resembling a bar chart of global wealth. Now it is office towers that have begun the supertall race.
Recent zoning changes, introduced amid concerns that New York was losing its competitive advantage to other global cities, have made it both legally and economically feasible to replace aging office buildings with towers on a scale previously unimaginable.
The newest arrival is Foster + Partners’ headquarters for JPMorgan Chase at 270 Park Avenue. The dark tower recalls SOM’s iconic John Hancock Center in Chicago, though without the elegance or structural clarity that made the original so compelling. Its diagonal bracing is prominently expressed on the east and west facades. Rising almost 1,400ft, with 60 floors and nearly 2.5 million sq ft of office space, it is unquestionably monumental.
Occupying the top 750ft of the tower is Leo Villareal’s LED installation, Celestial Passage. Rather than using light to reinforce the building’s architecture, the crown has been transformed into a giant fuzzy LED screen which hovers ominously over Midtown at night.
The experience at street level is little better. Spanning an entire block above the subterranean train platforms of Grand Central Terminal, the site was until recently home to SOM’s 1960s Union Carbide Building, which stood back from Park Avenue and its side streets behind a public plaza. Foster’s new building takes the opposite approach.
To maximise the office floorplates above, the envelope is pushed to the property lines. At the same time, the tower must thread its structure between the maze of railway tracks below to reach bedrock, requiring its facade to cant back roughly 80ft above the sidewalk. Massive fan-shaped diagonal columns transfer the load. Structurally, it is an extraordinary feat. As an urban experience, however, it feels deeply unsettling.
Despite all this, you still cannot enter the building directly at ground level. Because of the train platforms beneath, the elevators begin on the second floor, avoiding the need for elevator pits to penetrate the station below. Foster choreographs the arrival from the Park Avenue side through a series of grand exterior and interior ramps and steps. The result is a street-level experience which feels more defensive than welcoming, more like a building designed to resist floods than one occupying such a prime commercial site in Midtown.
Although 270 Park Avenue gives the building its address and ceremonial front door, the smaller Madison Avenue entrance is where most people actually arrive. Its immediate proximity to a Grand Central Terminal and subway entrance makes it by far the busier approach.
Less structurally dramatic than the Park Avenue entry, it feels almost like another project altogether, framed by two massive, dark gray, fieldstone-clad walls by Maya Lin whose presence feels oddly overbearing against the structural logic of the rest of the building.
None of this is to suggest that the building lacks quality. It is exquisitely detailed throughout, every junction meticulously resolved, right down to the American flag in the lobby, permanently fluttering in a carefully engineered artificial breeze.
Unlike London, New York’s skyline has little difficulty absorbing ever-taller buildings. When the average office tower already exceeds 500ft, height is no longer the issue.
The real question remains the same one first posed by 120 Broadway over a century ago: what does the city receive in return? For generations, New York answered that question by demanding more light, more air, and more public space in exchange for ever-larger private buildings. At 270 Park, that bargain appears to have been forgotten.
Here, Chase’s new blockbuster has busted this block. It overwhelms the street, sacrificing the quality of the public realm in pursuit of corporate supersizing. Nor is it likely to be an isolated case. Several similarly scaled office towers are already planned nearby.
Perhaps history will judge 270 Park Avenue more kindly. After all, 120 Broadway is now a designated landmark and serves as the home of the Department of City Planning, the very institution that now writes the rules born from that building’s own excesses.
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