Echoes of Ancient Egypt as New Tower Rises in Manhattan

If you find yourself in Midtown Manhattan and have a few minutes to spare, stop by 270 Park Ave. on 49th Street and you will witness the birthing of a colossus. This is how it must have felt to see the pyramids of Egypt under construction. The old Union Carbide Building, later the world headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, occupied the site for almost 70 years before being torn down in 2021 to make way for the structure now being built. It too will house the House of Morgan, but will stand twice as tall as the older building. Rising to nearly 1,400 feet and 60 stories, 270 Park will be one of the tallest office towers in the world, and it promises to be the city’s first “all electric” skyscraper. Although not yet topped out, it already rises over a forest of splayed iron piers that fan out massively from their base.Like its predecessor, the new building will have the distinction of occupying the entire block between Madison and Park and, like that predecessor, the bulk of it will stand on Park, with a squatter annex immediately to the west. For all its size, the older building could accommodate only 3,500 employees: the replacement will have offices for 15,000, even as it doubles the amount of outdoor space available to them and to the public.The new 270 Park is the second building in the past few years to rise over the imploded remains of a mid-century office tower on that stretch of Park from 57th Street to Grand Central. The other, on the east side of the avenue at 55th Street, is 435 Park. Both early buildings were conceived in the drabest rectilinear language of post-war modernism, 270 Park by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie du Bois of Skidmore Owings and Merril, 435 Park by Kahn & Jacobs. As it happens, both of those misbegotten piles have now been reinvented by the same man, Sir Norman Foster, whose other skyscrapers in Manhattan include the Hearst Tower at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue and Tower Two at the World Trade Center.In both cases, the new version is more imposing and more interesting than what it replaced, even if the results fall short of that thrillingness, that iconic quality that other skyscraper architects have generated with stunning success in recent years. That is to say that these two buildings, while good, have a certain middling quality, as they seem to strive for a panache that ultimately eludes them. If they err on the side of mediocrity, as was certainly the case with the buildings they replaced, not all mediocrity is equal — and the mediocrity of the latest generation, which has learned from the mistakes of its predecessors, is far more pleasant and congenial to human inhabitation than its post-war equivalent ever was. 270 Park Ave. Foster + PartnersCertainly Lord Foster’s 270 Park is not boring, as was the case with the earlier building. The question is whether it is interesting enough. In form it is a tapered tower constrained by a corset of pillars that recall the diagrid of the Hearst Tower. Its nine symmetrical bays become incrementally taller as they converge on the center of the building. Presumably to increase its height, Lord Foster has crowned it with a massive two-tiered lantern that serves absolutely no purpose. Yet like the lanterns of the Bloomberg Building, One57 on 57th Street, and the new One Vanderbilt, it will be a welcome adornment of the city, at least at night.Perhaps the best part of the building — the most pharaonic element of all — promises to be the grand lobby, which will stretch with clear sight lines from Park all the way west to Madison. Given its interplay of monolithic travertine blocks on either side of a central stairway, together with those fanning piers and the dotted light fixtures on the ceiling, all that is lacking are the semi-naked trumpeters, the charioteers, and a divided chorus of Numidian slaves, to mount a first-rate staging of “Aida.”

Echoes of Ancient Egypt as New Tower Rises in Manhattan

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