Norman Foster’s 270 Park and the Rise of the New Office Building

One Sunday morning in Hong Kong, not long before the moment in 1997 when Great Britain handed its former colony back to China, I went for a run around the Peak, a towering hill that provides some much-needed green space in an unbelievably dense city. Afterward, I meandered down toward the Star Ferry dock in Victoria Harbour and was startled by an eerie, unidentifiable sound. It was loud and high-pitched, like an enormous flock of birds.

The sound kept getting louder as I approached the HSBC building, a landmark office tower, completed in 1986, that was famous among the architectural cognoscenti for appearing to be made from an entirely different kit of parts than most buildings of the period. The HSBC building was neither a smooth glass box nor an exercise in postmodernism, festooned with imitation classical ornamentation. Instead, it had an Erector Set aesthetic, with an exoskeleton that looked as though it had been painstakingly crafted by a 10-year-old boy. The building had been my introduction to its architect, Norman Foster, but I’d never quite grasped its appeal. What I encountered that day, however, would turn Foster into a longtime hero of mine.

The 44-story building was a remarkably open structure with offices lining both sides of a full-height central atrium. The tower roosted atop an open-air, ground-level plaza, protecting the space beneath it from Hong Kong’s hot sun and tropical downpours. As it turned out, Sunday was the one day off for the nannies and housekeepers of the city. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these people, freed for a day from childcare or housework, were gathered in the outdoor space beneath the building to partake in communal picnics. The sound I’d heard was that of a massive number of women talking to each other more or less at once. And the scene—something that no architect, even one as clever as Foster, could have anticipated or planned for—endeared the building to me forever.

For a decade or two after, I admired Foster’s output: his glass dome atop Berlin’s Reichstag, his Bilbao metro system (the glass-arched entryways to the stations are referred to locally as “Fosteritos”), his London City Hall, a sort of glass snail shell with a spiraling interior pathway (Foster said it “expresses the transparency of the democratic process”). I especially liked his first building in New York, the Hearst Tower on West 57th Street. All of them deployed the standard technique of modern architecture, the glass curtain wall, but in ways that were defiantly nonstandard.

The Hearst Tower, completed in 2005, sits above the publisher’s 1920s headquarters, six stories of Art Deco splendor topped with more than 40 stories of glass-and-steel triangles. The marriage of old and new was at once harmonious and startling, dismantling decades of rule-making about the proper contextual treatment for a historical structure. The façade is an undulating array of diamonds in a city of rectangles, surprising but also practical. According to the Foster website, the triangular panels represent “a highly efficient solution that uses 20 percent less steel than a conventionally framed structure.” My admiration only grew when I learned that Foster had worked closely on several projects with Buckminster Fuller, whose most famous invention, the geodesic dome, was driven by the idea that triangles are stronger and more efficient than rectangles. The Hearst Tower, though alien to the New York skyline, was a welcome addition, because it suggested that the past and present could coexist in harmony, like geological strata, and also suggested a tantalizing future, one in which Fuller’s domes found their way into mainstream use, albeit extruded into high-rise form.

Then my uncritical regard for Foster hit a roadblock. In 2008, he was hired by the New York Public Library to do radical reinvention of the main research library, the monumental structure on Fifth Avenue with lions out front (now officially the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building). The NYPL intended to sell off some of its real estate, including the humble Mid-­Manhattan Library, housed in the former Arnold Constable department store across Fifth Avenue. The idea was to incorporate a circulating library, something friendly and attractive, into a building that many found intimidating. What Foster proposed was a sleight-of-hand: He would remove the seven levels of stacks that held some 2.5 million books (and also, not incidentally, provided structural support for the massive reading room on the building’s top floor) and replace them with… a Fosterito, one of his signature glassy pavilions, which would house a circulating library.

It was one of those moments in which it becomes clear that a starchitect’s bag of tricks is perhaps not as deep as he might have thought it was. Or, alternately, that geniuses who have made their name with one big idea often repeat it too many times. New Yorkers who cherished the Research Library, influential writers and scholars among them, signed petitions, filed lawsuits, and held demonstrations on the Fifth Avenue steps. The plan was finally scrapped in 2014, in part because a new NYPL president, Tony Marx, had arrived in 2011 and didn’t exactly love the concept he’d inherited from his predecessor, Paul LeClerc. Also, with the change in mayors in 2014 from Michael Bloomberg to Bill de Blasio, the $150 million in funding earmarked for the project dropped out of the city’s budget.

In the end, the Foster plan was scrapped for a less iconic but more deft solution in which the Dutch firm Mecanoo, headed by Francine Houben, artfully renovated both the Mid-Manhattan Library (topping it with Midtown’s first truly public roof deck) and the Research Library, a solution that respected the two buildings and their various users.

Meanwhile, Foster’s practice grew into an immense enterprise called Foster and Partners, with a majority of shares owned by a Canadian equity firm, Hennick and Company, and the rest held by Foster and his family, along with more than 200 members of the team who work there. Foster and Partners has become a familiar presence in New York City: the Apple stores; an art gallery on the Bowery; and 425 Park, an office tower built on the bones of its mid-20th-century predecessor. When I look at 425 Park, which uses Foster’s trademark triangles ornamentally, like the fins on a vintage Cadillac, I see a familiar story in architecture: dazzling innovation that lapses into a signature style.

Nearing completion just a few blocks south is the latest Manhattan office tower from Foster and Partners, the new corporate headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. The building, at 270 Park Avenue, is a 60-story office tower that replaces the bank’s previous home, a 52-story gray-glass rectangle that was originally built as the headquarters of Union Carbide. The first 270 Park, completed in 1960, was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and was the sort of mid-century glass box that exemplified postwar architecture in Manhattan. When Union Carbide moved to the suburbs in the 1980s, the building became the headquarters for a series of banks that ended with JPMorgan Chase, which eventually outgrew it.