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 y…
