28 Liberty Street (New York City, New York)

 office building, skyscraper, 1960_construction, movie / film / TV location, International style architecture

813-foot, 60-story International-style office building completed in 1960. Designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore Owings & Merrill for Chase Manhattan Bank, it was downtown's first tower-in-a-plaza. The building is rectangular in plan and sheathed in anodized aluminum and glass, rising without setbacks, situated in a 90,000-square-foot raised plaza. Twenty square columns, on the northern and southern elevations, rise straight up from the plaza the entire height of the tower; together with 20 interior columns they support the building.

The bank complex spans two city blocks and uses the development rights from both sites. The office tower slab, along with five underground floors, occupying the Liberty Street side block and the adjoining block having the open plaza on top of two floors of banking space. The office tower houses 167,000 m² of space and the floors beneath 56,000 m².

Founded in 1877 and named after Salmon Chase, President Lincoln's Treasury Secretary, the Chase National merged with the Bank of the Manhattan in 1955 to form the Chase Manhattan Bank. The building project was first announced in 1955 and involved the creation of a "superblock" comprising two city blocks. The old Chase headquarters building on the other block at 18 Pine Street (Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, 1928) was retained and renovated.

The glass-walled entrance level of the tower is recessed, with only the columns from the facade above extending to the plaza level. The enormous sheets of plate glass effectively render the ground floor transparent. On the upper floors, the space between the main rectangular support columns is vertically accentuated by a series of narrow aluminum mullions extending to the top of the tower.

The architects presented two different layouts for the new Chase headquarters: a 52-story tower with a lower 15-story nearby, as well as the actually realized single 60-story tower. The design itself derived much from a previous SOM undertaking, the much smaller Inland Steel Building (1955-58) in Chicago, which pioneered the use of an exterior column system along with a vertically accentuated glass wall facade. The outward appearance of the Chase project was in fact very much just an enlarged version of the Chicago building. Construction commenced on 28 January 1957 the building was completed by the summer 1960. The construction had cost $121 million, plus the cost of obtaining the city blocks as the building site. Many of the floors of the building had interiors designed by Theodore Hofstatter & Co. On the 60th floor is an executive dining room with views all over lower Manhattan. The extensive interior design is by Davis Allen and Ward Bennett.

The sculpture work Group of Four Trees (1972) on the plaza is by Jean DuBuffet. There is also the 5-meter deep circular sunken well for Isamu Noguchi's Sunken Garden (1964), a water sculpture garden with basalt rocks imported from Japan (and originally also with goldfish) -- the street-level banking offices open to the well through their glass walls. The bank has also an art collection of its own.

The lobby was used as a filming location for S3E3 of the HBO original series "Succession" as the headquarters of Waystar Royco as they are raided.

s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/2294.pdf
archive.org/details/forgingmetropoli00dolk/page/46/mode...
www.wsj.com/articles/a-landmark-office-tower-in-lower-m...
eye4story.smugmug.com/LOCATIONS/28-LIBERTY-ST-LOBBY-OFF...