Early in Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel Cosmopolis, asset manager Eric Packer, already a billionaire at twenty-eight, beholds “an undistinguished sheath of hazy bronze glass,” almost a thousand feet high, before he is chauffeured around Midtown on a Homeric quest to get a haircut. The sight triggers a poignant criticism of the ossified lingo we use to talk about architecture. “He took out his hand organizer and poked out a note to himself about the anachronistic quality of the word skyscraper,” DeLillo writes. “No recent structure ought to bear this word. It belonged to the olden soul of awe, to the arrowed towers that were a narrative long before he was born.”
No arrow springs forth from 270 Park Avenue’s crown, but the new $3 billion headquarters of JPMorgan Chase—easily the most talked about building to open in New York City in over a decade—does have a distinguished top. It is also conspicuously bronze. Its author, Norman Foster, is the glabrous figurehead of the global firm that bears his surname. Unlike Eric Packer, Foster—who celebrated his ninetieth birthday last year—is neither young nor a billionaire (with an estimated net worth just shy of $250 million, he is, nonetheless, the world’s richest architect). Yet he resembles DeLillo’s glacial antihero in one key respect: an anxiety about keeping up with the latest tech. Packer realizes he will soon need to “junk” his hand organizer; in a bid to recapture the olden soul of awe Foster agreed to dispose of 270 Park’s predecessor, a midcentury tower primarily designed by Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The merits and demerits of that decision, and the brassy sheath it yielded, are debated in the following pair of appraisals. —THE EDITORS
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.”
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE TODAY lacks confidence. In the suburbs, mass- market brick and cheap plywood have given way to cheaper Hardie Board, every new house now eternally noncombustible. On campus, Brutalist citadels from the golden ages of architecture and academia get swapped out for athletic buildings at once ostentatious and desperate for validation, like the tax cheats whose names have been affixed to their façades. In the cities, massive voids carved out by decades of racism, greed, and mismanagement belatedly get filled by structures that seem ignorant of basic spatial logic—the best new infill housing, which we have no choice but to build, is more tentative and clumsy than the worst 1970s parking garage, which should never have been built in the first place. And everywhere we look, cut-rate sub-Costco warehouses are going up with shocking speed, temporary in their appearance but all too consequential in their impacts. Is it a data center? A concentration camp? Only the price of a barrel of oil and the whims of a handful of fascist millennials determine which of the two we’ll build today.