Some Like It Not

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.

In its lack of confidence, contemporary American architecture is as transparent about the conditions of its creation as high modernism at its highest. The very best efforts by the country’s architects confront the fact of decline and crisis directly. The very worst attempt to obscure and elide, ladling on expense in the hopes that someone somewhere might believe that they’re looking at a fortress rather than a wasteful fake. It is only in this respect—as the ultimate in insecurity and artifice—that Foster + Partners’ 270 Park Avenue qualifies as superlative. The kindest thing that can be said about the worst building Norman Foster has ever designed is that it meets and exceeds its moment.

OLD MEN TODAY TEND TO GET publicity only when they die, correspond with powerful sex offenders, or start wars to impress other old men. But last fall found Foster taking a sui generis victory lap untethered from death or violence, living his best life as he rode around in a water bike (“not [to] be called a pedal boat, or pedalo,” stipulated Foster’s wife, Elena Ochoa Foster, in Ian Parker’s epic-length New Yorker profile). Foster was proud of his five-decade-long oeuvre and also proud of Wind Dance, his first work of sculpture, situated in the middle of 270 Park’s east-west lobby. Wind Dance is a 3D-printed pole surmounted by an American flag that purportedly flutters in concert with the breeze outside the building. I can’t personally vouch for the effect—NYRA’s requests to let me tour 270 Park went unanswered—but the fluttering, I’m told, is robust. I’m happy for Foster, or sorry that it happened.

The arrival of Foster’s biggest building threw critics, Redditors, vloggers, and drone operators into a state of mass wilding-out. “By any measure it is a prodigy.… None can match its complexity, sophistication, and unexpected civic-mindedness,” raved Michael J. Lewis in The Wall Street Journal. Speaking on behalf of the r/skyscrapers community, Sweaty-Gap-231 declared, “I think it’s really cool and Id love to see more buildings with such a strong sense of style.” There were a few dissenters, like Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian and Casey Mack in Log, but for months I couldn’t open a new tab without being encouraged to ogle an image of the building’s vehemently cantilevered base or skim a regurgitated post about JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s commitment to sustainability. Savvy publicists labored to ensure that no detail of 270 Park’s interior life would be left undercelebrated—not Epstein correspondent Deepak Chopra’s consulting role in the health and wellness departments, not the nineteen-restaurant food hall either “curated” or “inspired” or “catered” by Danny Meyer, not the authentic Irish pub on the thirteenth floor that printed Dimon’s face on the heads of its perfect pints until, as reported by the Journal, the big man started to “[worry] it would suggest the bar in the $3 billion headquarters he helped build was some kind of vanity project.” (In his coiled but perceptive review for New York Magazine, Justin Davidson observed that Dimon “is, in effect, sculpting a chunk of the city to his priorities.”)

With the exception of several thousand bankers, a carefully selected handful of representatives from the press and influencer sectors, and a midsize army of service workers, New Yorkers will only ever encounter 270 Park’s excesses from below or afar, and here there is some genuinely good news to share: Foster’s tower is so awkward and so bulky that it has done the impossible and ennobled Billionaire’s Row. 432 Park in particular seems reborn—compared with its new neighbor, Rafael Viñoly’s 1,396-foot strip of graph paper, completed in 2015, now feels like something of a masterpiece. The rest of the 57th Street cluster (Central Park Tower, 111 West 57th Street, One57) fare worse, because they are worse, and still I’d take their radical, vertiginous thinness over 270 Park’s oafish heft.

The undistinguished canon of contemporary New York skyscraper architecture offers natural and unfavorable analogies, but one comparison that weaseled its way into my head is Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building, now 550 Madison (1984). In both cases, the PR story trumps the architectural one. (The teaser in the top right corner of the January 8, 1979, cover of  Time, which features Johnson holding a party sub–sized model of his building, reads “IRAN: Violence and Chaos.”) As Michael Sorkin put it in The Village Voice when AT&T was first announced:

What 270 Park and AT&T have in common isn’t hype so much as hype subsumed into shitty form. Much has been said about AT&T’s insipid Chippendale pediment, which gifted the postmodernism marketing complex its greatest (that is, worst) symbol and synecdoche. I don’t have much to add to the chorus—it still sucks. And that’s if you can see it at all. Johnson’s advertisement for himself is really half an advertisement. Following the grain of Madison Avenue, AT&T amounts to less than nothing: a narrow granite tower with three portholes at the bottom and six bland vertical bands of tiny windows notable only for the way they stretch up at the top, a photocopy gone wrong. No New York skyscraper is so blithe about its dual personality. (For that matter, no other New York skyscraper makes such a fetish out of its blitheness.) The Empire State Building (1931) also has two distinct façades—business on the latitude, party on the longitude—but no matter where you’re gazing from, it is indubitably itself. Not so with AT&T, which—depending on the angle—is either the most stupid building in New York or the most boring.

270 PARK ISN’T BORING. But it, too, is bifurcated in a way that points to chronic indecision, a concept previously foreign to Foster’s steady hand. In his great buildings and in his embarrassing ones, the Baron of Thames Bank has operated with smooth consistency—you cannot confuse his Willis Building (1975) in Ipswich or his Bilbao metro stations (1995) or his idiot pyramid in Astana, the Palace of Peace & Reconciliation (2006), for anything other than themselves. 270 Park, by contrast, feels like a split entity, the Jamie Dimon two-for-one special at more than quadruple the cost of each. Pick your poison: faux-1970s monolith from the east and west sides, backlot Gothamcore from the north and south.

For the least ignoble view of the building, head to Murray Playground, in Long Island City. From there, to the southeast, 270 Park is tall and skinny, tapering up to a flat top that looks narrower than it actually is, a simple shape spoiled by a real diagrid augmented with so much chunky cladding that it comes off looking fake. The reference is obviously Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan’s majestic John Hancock Center (now 875 North Michigan Avenue, completed in 1969), in Chicago, but debt does the debtor no favors. Big John is a cold, mean, intense building that takes pride in its every texture and variation. The glorious diagonals and unwavering verticals, the thin white headband of the ninety-eighth floor—there’s so much to look at! Whereas its New York imitator is most tolerable when it manages to convince you of its essential plainness.

Spreading across most of its block, 270 Park is nearly three hundred feet wide. That kind of expanse demands a creative approach, especially in a city whose skyscrapers both exploit and conform to the constraints of their square lots. The two major Midtown exceptions to this geometry—Empire State and 30 Rockefeller Plaza (1933)—are also two of the city’s greatest structures, and it’s no surprise that Foster × Dimon can’t match the former’s granitic carveouts or the latter’s chiseled limestone. On the building’s north and south ends, the oligarchs have opted for a literalist near-parody of the New York setback style, a child’s drawing supersized into joylessness: nine segments, then seven, and on and on until we arrive at one giant Jenga block at the top. Or is it a stubby hand sticking up a defiant middle finger? Graham and Khan’s Sears Tower (1973, now Willis Tower), no one’s idea of subtlety, also sheds vertical segments as it ascends, but it does so with a structural clarity that is inarguable. 270 Park, by contrast, reads as arbitrary. A setback here? A dopey crown there? Sure, whatever, why not.

FOR DIMON, SPENDING an extraordinary amount of his employer’s money, constructing the most bitchingly unobstructed lobby ever, and ensuring an ignominious end to a once-major architect’s once-major career are all, I think, secondary ambitions. More than anything, his self-monument had to look and feel expensive.

In images that continue to circulate on r/skyscrapers with strange frequency, 270 Park appears as a beacon, an insta-landmark towering serenely over its neighbors and the city it owns. Things aren’t quite as lofty IRL. A friend spotted two blue shims lodged between the cladding that covers the K brace above the main entrance, like a pair of semipermanent Post-it tabs abandoned for eternity. I guess I like the slender garbage cans on the Madison Avenue plaza, even if they’re on the small side. But why is all of it—the garbage cans, the cladding, the goofy canopy that juts out on the Park Avenue side—so insistently bronze?

I’ve always thought of Foster as an appealingly silver architect, but here he slathers on bronze like it’s all-you-can-spray day at the tanning salon. This ferruginous onslaught recalls an even ungainlier Brooklyn Tower (2022), the only twenty-first-century skyscraper in this city that approaches 270 Park’s bronze-to-the-wall bonanza. The fervor with which these supertalls thirst for classic NYC skyscraper glory is humiliating, but considerably more forgivable in low-rent high-rent SHoPitecture than in a $3 billion Foster + Partners joint that allegedly channels the latest and greatest in architectural finesse. That Foster has traded in the high-minded structuralism of his silver age for 270 Park’s brassy veneers is one of the building’s bitter ironies: In their rigorous theatricality, Foster’s best skyscrapers—Commerzbank (1997) in Frankfurt, Torre Moeve (2008) in Madrid, and of course Hong Kong’s HSBC (1985)—uphold the deco tradition to which he now pays condescending homage. For the right price, anyone can unlearn anything.

At HSBC and in his original 1992 scheme for the Reichstag renovation, Foster comprehensively collapsed the distinction between inside and outside. Porousness was the point. In relying so heavily on decorative bronze, he has again performed some distinction-collapsing, but unintentionally. 270 Park’s pretentious luxury-lite exterior resembles the kind of déclassé interior that can be found in any American urban center: The thick panels that enfold the building’s steel beams look like they’ve been salvaged from Danny Meyer’s food hall or maybe a Wonder ghost kitchen. I don’t think it was unreasonable to assume that Foster’s most high-profile New York commission ever would provoke more exalted associations.

In his most accomplished buildings, Foster elaborated a fusion of luxury and good taste that exceeded similar efforts by lesser lights like Renzo Piano, who rarely got the proportions right. Foster’s inherent sense of balance—the gift of not overdoing it—likely helped him get the job in the first place. Take his Torre de Collserola (1991) in Barcelona or the exquisite Millau Viaduct (2004) in southern France or even his sheds, like London’s Stansted Terminal (1991) and Norwich’s Sainsbury Centre (1977). These projects aren’t modest or cheap, but they possess an intuitive power. They’re proud of their steel structures, secure in their ability to generate pleasures of display without smothering said structures in Mike’s Hot Honey.

They also don’t have colossal LED screens at the top beaming vexillological obscenities into nonconsenting eyeballs. Inclined toward skepticism as I may be, even I wasn’t ready for the spectacle of blue, red, and white that greeted (and possibly lobotomized) me as I walked home from the 7 train nearly four miles east of Forty-Seventh and Park. The British flag, something I never want to encounter in surprise or otherwise, had materialized in honor of a birthday party Dimon held for King Charles, who wasn’t in attendance. I have no beef with Times Square’s nighttime daytime, and the Las Vegas Sphere, which I haven’t yet seen up close, seems admirably contemporary in its dystopian logic—but shouldn’t the glimmering top of the most publicized and expensive New York skyscraper in recent memory refrain from advertising imperial kitsch at retina-threatening levels of brightness?

Most of the time, 270 Park’s top is given over to Leo Villareal’s vaguely decoish sepia compositions, subject to their own hype wave in the Times and elsewhere. Villareal’s Celestial Passage is ultimately too corporate to be truly hateable, closer to third-tier airport art than to the flagrancy of AT&T’s summit, but it does usefully distill the building’s inability to distinguish between a flourish and a distraction. Foster used to make coherent statements—now he assembles metal scraps and hopes for the best.

SPEAKING OF THIRD-TIER ART, nothing about 270 Park is as mystifying as Maya Lin’s block-long A Parallel Nature, a stone wall split in two and artlessly appended to the building’s west façade, the punctum (such as it is) of the public (such as it isn’t) plaza facing Madison Avenue. Lin’s sober, tough-minded Vietnam War Memorial (1982) remains unparalleled in its audacity, and no aesthetic contrast speaks to the gap between the late-modern then and the nonmodern now than the few thousand feet that separate the memorial from the sites of Trump’s self-commemorations still-hypothetical (Triumphal Arch) and real-adjacent (White House Ballroom). The kindest thing I can say about A Parallel Nature, on the other hand, is that a great deal of effort was exerted to make real stones look exactly like the fake rock walls from the mini-golf courses of my youth.

Falsity intrudes in other ways, too. On my first street-level encounter with 270 Park well over a year ago, I was struck by the grille panels arrayed between the macro braces that run from the full height of the eighty-foot lobby to ground level, each panel composed of hundreds of dinky-looking bronze rings. Naturally I assumed that my view of the rings was temporary, that some kind of insulation would promptly conceal this busy, highly un-Fosterian vista forever. Naturally I assumed wrong.

Architecture is an art of association. Fixate on a detail long enough and something else comes to mind. In the case of the rings, the association was instantaneous: the burgundy-bronze ceiling of the Sheremetyevo-2 international terminal, completed for Moscow’s 1980 summer Olympics. I stood under those rings as a child on my way out of the USSR, and they greeted me when I returned to visit Moscow in the 1990s and early 2000s. The sumptuous sweep of that ceiling stands in for a soulful tendency in late socialist architecture, a brief era when some of the major civic buildings of the Eastern bloc seemed to embrace disco with a Soviet face.

What is a corny detail like that grille doing in a soulless Foster building? What Foster wanted, I assume, was to match the circular lampshades that hang from the unobstructed lobby’s unobstructed ceiling. Those work well enough on their own, suggesting a midcentury Eastern European train station or at least a midcentury Park Avenue lobby, but the translation between ceiling and grille is strikingly amateurish. For one thing, the lampshades are laid out in a neat grid that doesn’t and can’t line up with the honeycomb pattern outside. For another, the podium bracing helpfully delineates interior from exterior, however similar the shapes may be. In lieu of classic modernist continuity, what Foster produced was thoughtless disjuncture. It’s a self-undermining gesture and, like Celestial Passage and A Parallel Nature, a symptomatic one.

AS 270 PARK WAS BEING ROLLED OUT last fall, much was made of its extreme quantity of steel: Dimon wanted his building fancy, and he wanted it heavy. As Wainwright wrote at the time, “adding a few more columns and reducing the spans by a couple of meters could have reduced the building’s carbon footprint by 20–30%.” But then, God forbid, the lobby might have had to endure some obstructions.

More than 270 Park’s irreconcilable façades, more than Villareal’s upmarket LED slop, the building’s defining formal feature is its steel-forward base, with its protrusive cantilever and its burly beams resolving into huge fans. To walk under the cantilever and around these beams is to internalize just how oppressive 270 Park really is. Spend a few minutes among the vested, Uber Black–bound hordes on the Park Avenue plaza and you’ll discover the answer to the titular question posed by Norberto López Amado and Carlos Carcas’s insipid 2010 documentary How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?: Way too much!

“I often hear journalists criticizing the carbon footprint of all the steel and the glass that go into the tall buildings that make such cities [as New York] possible,” Foster wrote recently in Arquitectura Viva. “I would urge them to put prejudice and emotion aside for a moment and, instead, to look at the big picture and consider the data before jumping to conclusions.” Considering the data emotionlessly, I’ve engaged in prejudice-free deliberation and have arrived at my conclusion: Foster is full of shit. The structuralist case for 270 Park that the architect unspools relies on a set of rehearsed constraints and preconditions, which I’ve organized below on a spectrum from explicitly invoked to necessarily unstated:

All these purported desiderations implicitly serve to justify the demolition of Natalie de Blois’s Union Carbide Building (1960), retrofitted in 2011 (“the largest green renovation of a headquarters building in the world”) but demolished only a decade later, LEED Platinum Certification drifting off into the sunset. According to Foster and Dimon, Union Carbide was too small, too cramped, too unsuited to the times, and in any case the efficiency of its upcycling more than made up for the inefficiency of demolition. (In his Log piece, Mack effectively cuts through all this environmental self-justification.)

It’s notable that de Blois’s decidedly non-oafish midcentury landmark found a way to negotiate the Metro-North tracks without resorting to 270 Park’s cantilevered contortions. Foster’s building actually uses the original beams down at the platform level, all that new steel bending and grimacing its way toward a logical solution from the Kennedy era (John F., not Robert F. Jr.). Indeed, de Blois’s comparatively low-key approach to the business of architectural problem-solving makes clear that 270 Park doesn’t look the way it does due to the site or the brief’s constraints—it looks that way because that’s how Foster and Dimon wanted it.

FOR ALL THOSE BILLIONS, DIMON deserved to get at least the appearance of stability, and Foster should have been the right man for the job. HSBC, one of the greatest buildings of the last century, takes its permeability seriously, even as it exudes solidity. And you don’t have to love Apple Park (2017) in Cupertino to think that it could survive an apocalypse. (Not that you’d be able to determine much of anything through close observation. As Christopher Hawthorne wrote in a recent installment of his excellent Punch List newsletter, ahead of the building’s opening Apple made a “blanket decision to keep each and every architecture critic on the planet at bay,” thus breaking “an implicit contract that has held together the practice of architecture criticism for a full century.” As Cupertino goes, so goes Park Avenue?)

Unlike HSBC and Apple Park, 270 Park looks precarious from each of its mismatched sides. Its street-level cantilevers are, I suppose, an attempt to make lemonade out of 3D-printed lemons: Foster came up with an overly complicated solution to a problem of his own making, only to home in on a feature that would deliver higher drama. I imagine that Minoru Yamasaki’s Rainier Tower (1977) in Seattle or Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital (1975, demolished in 2014) in Chicago were on the team’s mind as they calculated how much the trusses would have to fan out, but instead of those buildings’ lightness, what 270 Park achieves at its base is a paradoxical, dangerous-seeming weightiness. Only insularity and solipsism could deliver such profound aesthetic misjudgment, and only the money and resources expended on this profoundly unnecessary structure could produce an overlarded work of architecture that also feels so unstable. No press release or well-angled photo can disguise the fact that New York’s most hyped building looks like it’s going to tip over. “A tree trunk that’s been a little chopped off by a beaver” is how my daughter characterized it.

After decades designing buildings that, successful or otherwise, evince a cogent understanding of their strengths and their limits, Foster has concluded his career with a skyscraper that interprets its comically obvious lack of confidence as a show of force. The source of this profound misunderstanding isn’t architectural but neither is it unexplainable or cosmic. It’s true that Dimon has, to quote Davidson, sculpted a chunk of the city to his priorities. But as Dimon himself understands, reality’s priorities may diverge from his own. “There will be a cycle one day,” he said earlier this year. “My anxiety is high over it. I’m not assuaged by the fact that asset prices are high. In fact, I think that adds to the risk.”

For Dimon, risk is no reason not to build what he has called “the future of the workplace,” and thus his headquarters is intended as the ultimate neoliberal mic drop, a building that’s too big to fail housing a bank that’s even bigger. A gargantuan K brace for the world’s largest K-shaped economy! But a billionaire CEO and the world’s richest architect may not be the people best equipped to assess the facts on the ground. In its frantic references to moments of past splendor and its insistence that its own precariousness is a form of stability, Foster’s folly is a monument to an age of American capitalist supremacy that was over long before Wind Dance took its first flutter. The longer you stare at its setbacks stacking tentatively skyward and the grasping diamonds aspiring its flanks, the more 270 Park begins to look like a house of cards.