Gentlemen Prefer Bronze

THE HEADQUARTERS TOWER for JPMorgan Chase at 270 Park Avenue by Foster + Partners is, if nothing else, a building for this moment. It is big, very big. It is expensive, very expensive, at a cost reported to be north of $3 billion. It is immodest in the extreme. It makes great claims to sustainability, which are true if you think only in terms of what it will cost to operate per square foot but not at all if you factor in the energy embedded in the distinguished tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill that was demolished to make way for it and the energy required to build a huge skyscraper in its place. The JPMorgan building strikes many people as ominous. The architecture critic for The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright, called it “a dark, looming mass” and said it seems “ready to swallow the dainty Chrysler Building that trembles in its shadow.”

Whatever. So far as the glorious Chrysler is concerned, I am much more worried about the effect of the proposed supertall down the street at 175 Park Avenue, which would be right next to it. JPMorgan is to the older building’s north, and it can only cast a figurative shadow over it, not a real one, whereas if 175 Park is built, it will entirely block all views of the Chrysler Building from the west. But we do not need the new 270 Park Avenue to remind us that the days of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings’ shared hegemony over the skyline are long past; it is hard enough to pick out these two landmarks now, given the number of skyscrapers in Manhattan that exceed them in height, and the argument that JPMorgan is big and mean and the Chrysler is sweet and vulnerable seems more than a little, well, naive.

But why are we shocked—shocked—that there are ever bigger towers rising in New York? As the Chrysler (1930), the Empire State (1931), 40 Wall Street (1930), and 70 Pine Street (1932) once changed the scale of the skyline, other tall buildings are doing that again today. We can lament the Darwinian nature of Manhattan as well as the fact that architectural Darwinism in New York has historically been more a story of the survival of the biggest than survival of the fittest, but it does little good to pretend that this is a problem new to our age or that it was in some way precipitated by JPMorgan’s decision to build an immense global headquarters in the heart of Midtown.

It’s no surprise that the JPMorgan Chase tower has brought all these issues to the fore. It is one of the world’s most expensive buildings, designed for one of the world’s largest banks by one of the world’s most famous and successful architects, on one of the world’s most prominent streets. It was never going to be a background building. It is there, more conspicuously there than anything that has gone up in New York in a long time. I must admit that I like the fact that everyone keeps asking me what I think of it. There aren’t that many new buildings, good or bad, that everybody seems to want to talk about. Now maybe this time I’m the one putting forth the soft, feel-good argument, but somehow the attention everyone is paying to this tower ought to be good for architecture. At least somewhat.

THERE ARE MANY WAYS to talk about this building, but critical response to it has so far focused mainly on the building’s urbanism, on its dark, heavy presence on Park Avenue and on what it means for the Midtown East section of Manhattan, where zoning regulations proposed at the end of the Bloomberg administration encourage much taller skyscrapers, of which this is a prime example. There has also been plenty of discussion about what 270 Park means in the context of Norman Foster’s oeuvre, which leans heavily toward expensive buildings for well-heeled clients and contains a mix of developer projects that are merely better than average and others that are among the most impressive skyscrapers of our time. You can see that range in New York, from a couple of OK but not great high-rise condos on the east side of Manhattan to the Hearst Tower (2006) across town from JPMorgan—after twenty years still one of the best tall buildings of this century—and 425 Park Avenue (2022) just up the street. And there has been plenty of talk about 270 Park’s spectacular lobby, visible from the street but not enterable by the public, and the interior environment it provides for the roughly ten thousand people who will work in it.

But I am intrigued by a whole other aspect of this building, which is where it stands in the long, complicated history of bank architecture. Banks are much more than office buildings, or at least they once were. For most of American history, banks have been designed to suggest power, history, and, most of all, stability. They were a form of symbolic architecture, as much as a church; if the church was crafted to make your thoughts move upward toward God, the bank was the protector of mammon, designed to make you feel confident that your money was safe. It is no accident that for a long time, banks frequently took the form of Renaissance palazzi or classical temples, fortresses of solidity that looked as if they had been there forever or at least were the descendants of buildings that had been there forever. Architecture to protect your money and a building suggestive of the long arc of time, two things that modernism generally had little patience for. In New York in the early twentieth century, a vast number of banks were designed by York & Sawyer, the firm that was to financial institutions what Rosario Candela was to luxury apartment houses, the architects whose association with a project was a kind of guarantee of respectability. The big, staid bank was often the centerpiece of a small city or town; in Passaic, New Jersey, where I spent my early childhood years, I remember an imposing brick tower on Main Avenue that was the city’s only true tall building, and of course it was the headquarters of the local bank. The only meaningful departure from this tradition of conservative, stolid banks in the early decades of the twentieth century were the ones designed by Louis Sullivan, the great modernist who concluded his career with a series of remarkably inventive and beautiful small-town banks in the Midwest, but even Sullivan’s magnificent jewel boxes in their way evoked stability; they didn’t change the paradigm of Bank as Important Building so much as demonstrate a novel way to achieve it, teaching a lesson of precision, attention to detail, and economy of means.

I suppose you could say that this began to change with the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, Howe & Lescaze’s masterpiece of 1932, the first International Style skyscraper in the United States (and now the Loews Philadelphia Hotel). It was followed sixteen years later by another modern masterwork, the Equitable Savings and Loan Association in Portland, Oregon, by Pietro Belluschi. But it was Gordon Bunshaft’s Manufacturers Bank on Fifth Avenue in New York, completed in 1954, that really changed the notion of what a bank could be: It was a pure glass box, full of light, everything about it seeming to defy the tradition of solidity and opacity. Famously, Bunshaft put the safe deposit vault on the main floor, not in the basement, so passersby could see it, a reminder to the anxious that despite all that glass, your money would still be safe here.

But if Bunshaft opened the door to transparency, his Manufacturers Bank also led to a blurring of the lines between banks and anonymous modern office buildings. It was a four-story glass villa in the middle of the city, an International Style version of the bank as Italian Renaissance palazzo, but soon financial institutions were commissioning glass towers that looked a lot like any random tall building. For a while many of them had large banking halls where people met with tellers and loan officers, until those places, too, began to fade away with the coming of ATMs; banks turned into storefronts, and even, more recently, into faux café lounges. By then cash had come to mean very little, as financial transactions morphed into blips on a computer screen. What is the architecture for that? The real model for a bank, the most logical architecture for it today, might just be the banal expanse of a data center.

WHATEVER YOU CAN SAY about JPMorgan, it is not a data center, and it is not an anonymous box that no one is supposed to see. It is very much meant to be seen, and it is meant to evoke in modernist terms many of the same things that older banks were meant to evoke: strength, stability, grandeur, and power. That, I think, is Foster’s most significant accomplishment in this building: not the way it sits in the skyline (about which more in a moment) or what it is like for the people who work in it (whom it treats quite generously) but the architectural recoding of the traditional bank building in the form of a modern supertall. Whether for political reasons or aesthetic ones, people tend to be more than a little ambivalent about qualities like power and grandeur today; we tend to value strength in the abstract but are often made uncomfortable by its architectural expression, which we think of as not friendly enough. Witness Brutalism, which remains unpopular among laypeople. Even those who celebrate good Brutalist buildings—the architecture of Paul Rudolph, say, or Boston City Hall (1968)—often do so not because they embrace their lack of amiability but because a patina, an aura of history, now attaches to them.

Buildings have been getting lighter, both literally and visually, but JPMorgan is not light at all; it is heavy and dark and assertive. When the tower was under construction I feared that what now seems assertive would turn out to be aggressive, and while there is a certain relief to this outcome, its visual weight is still startling. So many contemporary buildings, including Foster’s own, are visually light, often because they are so likely to be made of glass, and glass always looks light; even when it is dark it doesn’t carry the sense of visual weight that dark stone or metal does. Eero Saarinen managed to convey gravitas successfully with the somber, charcoal-gray granite façade of the CBS Building (1965), but there aren’t many newer buildings that can be described as tall, dark, and handsome. Even Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building (1984) was a medium pinkish granite. And most limestone buildings read as beige or gray.

“A dark building looks well in a city,” Saarinen said of CBS, and he was not wrong. JPMorgan, like CBS, is somber. The exterior bronze and the glass are dark in color, and the immense clusters of angled steel columns at the base, which fan out to support the huge mass of the tower above, make no attempt to hide their strength. They are weight lifters, not dancers. But—and here we come back to the whole question of what a bank should look and feel like—while the Park Avenue façade is guilty of a certain amount of structural exhibitionism, it has the powerful presence of a financial institution that has existed for a long time and expects to exist for a long time to come. It has authority, which implies a certain dignity. While Foster’s building looks nothing like the old JPMorgan headquarters by Trowbridge & Livingston that still stands at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets—the building that Paul Strand memorably photographed in 1915 as an ice-cold pattern of solid and void entitled Wall Street, New York—you feel as if Foster, too, wanted his building to convey the message that banking is a serious business. This is not your friendly neighborhood bank, and I am fine with that.

Indeed, I have found that walking past JPMorgan on Park Avenue is far pleasanter than I had expected it to be. I would certainly rather walk past this building than walk through Hudson Yards any day. There is a brittleness to a whole cityscape of glass. The JPMorgan tower may be many things, but brittle is not one of them. The thickly bundled, bronze-clad columns lift the huge structure up, and your eye notices that the north and south sides of the building bow out in gentle curves. I wish that the bank’s concerns about security had not prevented it from allowing Vanderbilt Avenue to extend northward underneath the elevated lobby, as a pedestrian pathway if not as an actual street. Instead, the huge mass of JPMorgan fills the entire block from Park to Madison, blocking Vanderbilt and sacrificing the opportunity to make a strong urban gesture.

Still, the form of the tower is more modulated, if not more subtle, than the stack of boxes it appears, from afar, to be. On Park Avenue the base of the façade is angled out over the sidewalk, which I feared would make you feel as if the tower were looming ominously over you, but it does not. It might be a stretch to call it welcoming, but it is not intimidating. The architectural welcome, such as it is, is more than a little disingenuous, however, because you are not, in fact, welcome at all; JPMorgan, in its zeal for security, will not allow the public inside the monumental, 290-foot-long, fifty-foot-high entry hall. Even though the biometric barriers at which employees and guests are cleared are far beyond the doors, meaning that a wide swath of the lobby could be public if the bank would allow it to be, security personnel do not let people without business there into even the outer reaches of the space. It is not only the dignity and strength of old banks that JPMorgan has sought to replicate here; it is also their aloofness.

In the Paul Strand photograph passersby are diminished in scale by the austere monumentality of the bank façade, which seems utterly unapproachable, not to say impenetrable; in the Foster building they are teased by views of the light and space within, which is decorated by two immense, brightly colored murals by Gerhard Richter and by an American flag on a central indoor flagpole that, thanks to hidden fans, seems to be flapping continuously in the wind. It is all rather theatrical, altogether different from 23 Wall Street, where even a glimpse of the interior was unthinkable. At 270 Park, there is a bit of a show, and the relationship of the public to the building is ambiguous, since this tower has no small degree of allure from the street. It is only when you get right up to the door that you discover it is as impenetrable as its ancestor.

Unless, of course, you are one of the thousands of people who work there. Then you will go up a wide central staircase or a side escalator to an upper lobby with seating, more art, and banks of elevators. (As with many other buildings north of Grand Central Terminal, the train tracks just below the tower prevent the elevators from going down to street level.) Above the lobby, the enormous lower stories are given over to trading floors; offices occupy the upper stories, which diminish in size as the building rises, culminating in a narrow slab at the top, which houses executive suites, dining rooms, and so forth. Floor-to-floor heights are more than generous, given that the building is listed as containing sixty stories and stretches to 1,388 feet. The previous building on the site was 707 feet tall, barely more than half JPMorgan’s height, and it had fifty-two floors. The justification for such a huge gain in height yielding just a few additional stories, presumably, is that the trading floors are enormous. But so is everything else about this building, and much of this additional height has gone into executive suites and administrative floors of regal proportions.

On the fourteenth floor is a huge, triple-height space with a couple of shops, multiple Danny Meyer restaurants, and a bar called Morgan’s. It is a kind of internal town square, a lavish public space for the use of the citizens of the city of JPMorgan Chase. You can be sure that there were no such offerings at 23 Wall Street or even at the various more recent skyscrapers that the bank occupied before this one. This new tower is to corporate amenities what the famously lavish 220 Central Park South, the most expensive of all the over-the-top supertall condominiums in New York, is to condo amenities.

The building’s overall shape, once you get above the acrobatics of the base, is a series of stepped-back slabs, though it might be more easily described as being like a shelf of narrow books, with the tallest in the center, flanked by shorter books that step down in even increments on each side of the tall book in the middle. The result is a profile that looks handsome on the skyline—not flashy but hardly dull, with just a hint of art deco to it. You can see it from everywhere, and it does more for the skyline than most of the supertall, superthin apartment towers that have sprung up over the last generation: This building, mirabile dictu, has a top. Supporting diagonal trusses form an exoskeleton of enormous, extruded diamonds on the façade, a reminder that the Hearst Tower, which introduced the so-called diagrid to the New York skyline, continues to have influence.

At JPMorgan, however, the diamonds don’t repeat the same geometry from top to bottom; they change in shape as the building rises, becoming tighter with each setback. The diamonds, in effect, become less extruded as the tower rises, which may make sense in terms of structure since each stepped-back section is shorter than the one beneath it, but it is still a bit disconcerting visually since you see this element getting squatter as the building itself gets lighter and thinner as it climbs toward the sky. In other words, the diamonds express compression at the top instead of the bottom. It’s counterintuitive.

The bank commissioned Leo Villareal, a gifted artist whose medium is LED and whose canvases are usually bridges and buildings, to light the exterior, which he has covered with 181,200 sets of pixels, each containing multiple LEDs that can be programmed to turn the façade into a huge design—sometimes it has been an American flag—or into an animated display of geometries that are intended to respond to the architecture. Is this an attempt to distract from, or even counter, the building’s visual heaviness? For some time last fall, as Villareal was testing his work, he was playing so vigorously with animation that the tower seemed more like it belonged in Las Vegas than on Park Avenue, but more recently either the artist or his client seems to have come to the realization that this did not enhance the building’s gravitas and the lighting has been tweaked to somewhat calmer effect. It is a welcome acknowledgment that sometimes a design is more effective if you do not use every technological arrow you have in your quiver.

DISCUSSING THE JPMORGAN CHASE tower in terms of its form, its symbolism, and its role in the skyline would seem to cover all points, but it does not. Its ancestors are not only banks, and they are not only skyscrapers; they are also the two important structures that occupied its site before it, ghosts that hover over the current 270 Park Avenue and impact the way we see this new edifice. The first, finished in 1917, was the Hotel Marguery, a handsome, sprawling complex of hotel suites and luxury apartments built around an elegant Italian Renaissance courtyard and designed by Warren & Wetmore, architects of Grand Central Terminal. It was a key part of the New York Central’s Terminal City complex, the project by which the railroad developed the land atop its tracks, essentially inventing the concept of air rights. The Marguery was one of Terminal City’s most elegant buildings, although by the postwar years it had declined considerably. Its suites were exceptionally popular among well-to-do men who found the notion of a fashionable address beside the train station to be the perfect place in which to house respectable women who were not their wives. In time the building became known less as a high-end residential hotel and more as a gathering place for less savory characters, including gamblers. It was almost torn down in the mid-1950s to make way for a new headquarters for Time Inc., which, frustrated by delays in getting some long-term tenants to move out, gave up and went to Sixth Avenue instead. In 1957 Union Carbide secured full control of the site and commissioned Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) to produce a headquarters tower that was finished in 1960 and designed largely by Natalie de Blois, an architect who, having the misfortune of living at a time when women architects were expected to design kitchens and not skyscrapers, was required to share credit with Gordon Bunshaft, her senior partner.

De Blois produced one of the better glass towers of the postwar era—an inventive variation on Mies that was not up to the level of Seagram or Lever House but only a notch below, and it should have been declared a city landmark; it certainly ranks among the finer examples of the cool, crisp midcentury modern aesthetic that SOM epitomized. When Union Carbide moved to Connecticut in 1981, the building was taken over by the Manufacturers Hanover Corporation, and ultimately, through a series of acquisitions and mergers, it became the headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, which in 2011 invested several hundred million dollars in upgrading the tower in what the company described as “the largest green renovation of a headquarters building in the world.”

So much for long-term investment, since only a few years after the renovation was finished, the bank, hungry for more space, decided to demolish 270 Park and replace it with the new tower. JPMorgan has made much in its public statements of the energy-saving aspects of its new building, which is an all-electric skyscraper that has triple-paned glass, advanced water recycling systems, and AI-driven energy management technology. The bank says nothing, however, about the loss of the energy embedded in the building it tore down, which, like the funds invested in its short-lived upgrade, is gone forever. And while the new structure makes extensive use of recycled materials, it cost a lot of energy to get them there and to assemble them on the site. The JPMorgan tower is energy efficient only if you think of it in terms of its daily operation and imagine that it got to Park Avenue by magic.

Two different acts by the city government are also part of this history: first, the Midtown East zoning provisions proposed at the end of the Bloomberg administration to encourage taller towers in the area; and second, the decision by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2018 to decline to designate the former Union Carbide Building as a landmark, a status it surely deserved. These two events made a much larger building not only possible but inevitable.

The decision made, the bank and its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, embarked on a search for an architect that culminated in the selection of Foster, which at least assured that the project would have a credible level of architectural ambition. It remains a deep sadness that we have lost a major postwar modernist skyscraper—the tallest building ever to be voluntarily demolished, in fact—especially when there are so many banal postwar towers left on Park Avenue all around it. Couldn’t JPMorgan have made the owners of one of the mediocrities across the street an offer they could not have refused? And yet we have a serious building of the next generation in this lost tower’s place. That is no incidental fact, no mere search for a silver lining. It is what used to happen all the time in New York, when good architecture would be lost but we could take comfort in the fact that it would be replaced by new architecture that was as good, maybe better—the old Waldorf-Astoria giving way to the Empire State Building, for example, or the Lenox Library being replaced by the Frick mansion. We gave up counting on that a long time ago, but maybe, at 270 Park Avenue, it is happening again.