The NYRA Guide to New York City highlights so much of what is ignored about the city’s architecture, as does issue #50. But I can’t give you praise without some criticism—in particular, regarding your coverage of JPMorgan’s new headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. The editors pair the reviews by Paul Goldberger and Mark Krotov in different terms, the former being favorable and the latter unfavorable. Each references Olly Wainwright’s pan in The Guardian—I approve—so I think that Goldberger and Krotov share at least some anxiety about the building.
Although both pieces comment on prior antecedents and precedents (Goldberger gives a great history of the site and the buildings that previously stood on it), I noticed two glaring omissions. The first is that there is no mention of Foster + Partners’ Comcast Technology Center in Philadelphia (completed in 2017), which is the best precedent for the JPMorgan project and is arguably a successful building in ways that JPMorgan is not. Not only does Comcast have better public art, it also has a publicly accessible lobby and a hotel at the top. Its very clear structure produced a better façade solution than that of its Manhattan successor, where wacky diagonals modulate, unsuccessfully, according to the size of the setbacks. The second omission is that both Goldberger and Krotov strangely defer to Lord Foster as though he were the supertall’s sole author. I suppose it’s convenient to do so when space is limited—though not that limited, as per NYRA standards. Does this maybe give too much credit to a man who was eighty-five when the building was under design during a period that overlapped with Covid-19? And doesn’t it oversimplify the interaction between a firm with a head count in the UK alone of over 1,300 and a storied American bank that will employ over ten thousand people at 270 Park Avenue (whose lobby, echoing what the critics have already said, is pointedly not public)? The full story of the design of this behemoth remains to be told.