JPMorgan Chase’s Soaring Skyscraper With Human Spirit
Designed by Foster + Partners, the bank’s $3 billion new building at 270 Park Ave. is a thrilling addition to the New York skyline, sensitive to people’s needs and the neighborhood despite its massive scale.
By Michael J. Lewis
The new JPMorgan Chase headquarters. Max Touhey/JPMorganChase. New York
The new headquarters of JPMorgan Chase at 270 Park Ave., which opened on Oct. 21, is the most consequential skyscraper built in New York in a generation.
By any measure it is a prodigy.
Taking up an entire city block between 47th and 48th streets, it reportedly cost $3 billion and contains 2.5 million square feet.
It may not be the tallest of the new Brobdingnagian buildings—the toothpick-thin supertalls below Central Park surpass its 1,388 feet—but none can match its complexity, sophistication and unexpected civic-mindedness.
The building was made possible when new zoning rules were proposed for East Midtown, as the 73-block area around Grand Central Terminal is designated.
Concerned about the lack of new construction (the average age of its office buildings was 70 years), the Department of City Planning relaxed its rules, permitting buildings of much greater density.
In exchange, these buildings would need to offer a certain amount of public space, including sidewalks wider than the stingy 12-foot standard of the neighborhood.
The rules were adopted in 2017, and the next year JPMorgan announced that it would replace the Union Carbide building with a skyscraper almost twice as tall.
Seen from the street, 270 Park first makes an impression of immense, turbulent energy.
It does not so much ascend as jolt out of the ground, as if from some subterranean launching pad.
Its walls tilt alarmingly outward, restrained by mammoth metal girders that spread out fanlike to hoist the building 80 feet into the air, after which it begins its sheer vertical rise.
The recessed ground story lets the sidewalk widen into a plaza, in defiance of the commercial logic of New York that insists every business building advance right up to the property line.
Street view of the building. Nigel Young / Foster + PartnersThe structural acrobatics were necessary to sidestep the rail lines directly below, but the dynamic form they take is characteristic of the architects, Foster + Partners, whose structurally expressive buildings helped launch the High Tech movement in architecture.
All the hallmarks of their work are present: the steel exoskeleton, the emphasis on the diagonal beams, and the tense dialogue between force and weight.
Such industrial exhibitionism is unusual today, when glass curtain walls typically conceal the working parts of the building, making them resemble a house of mirrored cards.
But Norman Foster, the firm’s founder, treats a mighty beam under visible tension as a joyous thing, like a beautiful naked athlete.
And the athleticism continues upward.
The building steps in sharply four times as it rises, with a rectilinear angularity that suggests a tapered tower of dominos.
If the shape is strikingly contemporary, it is also strangely familiar, recalling New York’s distinctive setback skyscrapers, those Art Deco ziggurats of the 1920s and ’30s.
The radically new and the radically traditional come together even more thrillingly the moment you step into the Park Avenue lobby.
A vast and lofty hall runs 290 feet, all the way through the building to Madison Avenue.
It is flanked to either side by the V-shaped beams of the steel truss, clad in bronze, giving all the dignity of pylons along an ancient ceremonial passage.
The sense of processional movement is enhanced by a broad and graceful stair, a form that Mr. Foster said, in the course of a tour of the building, was part of the historic language of bank architecture.
The center of the axis is marked by a pole bearing the American flag, waving in artfully supplied wind.
Skyscrapers may soar but their interiors rarely do.
After all, they are fungible real estate.
But 270 Park gives us the rare lobby whose scale and aspiration match the building’s presence on the skyline.
Visitors, alas, cannot pass the security barrier without clearance, but they may advance far enough to experience the spatial splendor, and to admire the two large-scale paintings by Gerhard Richter that flank the central passage.
It rivals the city’s finest lobbies, even that of the Woolworth Building. Go and see it.
The lobby, featuring paintings by Gerhard Richter. Nigel Young / Foster + PartnersA similar generosity with space prevails throughout the building, but not for reasons of conspicuous consumption.
Mr. Foster spoke passionately of the imperatives of health and well-being in an office building, and the role of fresh air and light.
The building’s employees, who will ultimately number 10,000, get twice the amount of air and 30% more daylight than those in typical New York offices.
The ceilings are accordingly high, and the windows startlingly huge, which explains why 270 Park contains 60 stories, while the Empire State Building, a significantly shorter building, manages to squeeze in 102.
Even with its high ceilings, the building opens up its interior further with double-height spaces around its eight trading floors.
Most extravagant is the triple-height sky lobby at the 14th floor, which has all the happy hubbub of the market square of a small town.
There is no reason that a High Tech architect cannot also be a humanist.
In even the building’s smallest details, there is a sensitive concern for the human experience.
For example, in the subtle arrangement of the external steps, which are not the usual blocky affairs but curve at their corners.
People approach buildings obliquely, not head on, Mr. Foster noted, as in the great buildings of antiquity.
I asked him where he learned this and he spoke of the triad of mentors who taught him when he came to Yale in the early 1960s, each of whom represented one quality: Paul Rudolph (“practicality”), Serge Chermayeff (“ideas”) and Vincent Scully (“history”).
A triple-height hub in the new building. Nigel Young / Foster + PartnersIn choosing Mr. Foster as their architect, JPMorgan Chase determined to make a commercial tower that is also a civic building, that opens itself up to the street, that respects the architectural culture of the city, and that treats its inhabitants with respect.
It affirms the value of city life, a remarkable feat in a building designed during the Covid years, when working remotely seemed to be the future.
Norman Foster, now age 90, is perhaps the only living architect to have watched Nazi bombs falling on his hometown.
He witnessed the Christmas bombings of 1940 that ravaged Manchester, England.
The next day he picked up stray shards of shrapnel, his first tactile encounter with our High Tech world.
A child of the Blitz, he grew up fascinated by technology but always aware of its human dimension.
He has now given his clients, and the city they inhabit, that rarest rara avis, a civilized skyscraper.
Mr. Lewis teaches architectural history at Williams College and reviews architecture for the Journal.
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