31 West 52nd Street (New York City, New York)

 office building, postmodern (architecture)

411-foot, 30-story Postmodern office building completed in 1986. Designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates for Gerald D. Hines Interests, it is clad in grey-brown Finnish Koral granite featuring four-story granite columns at the two main entrances, with dark-tinted glass windows, echoing a Byzantine theme. On the tower's west side, a continuous row of 69-foot-high octagonal columns forms a majestic backdrop for its fully landscaped plaza. The project included three major trading floors in its base and a 24,000-square-foot data center. E. F. Hutton Corporation was one of the first major tenants.

The 4-story base has notched corners; those at the west enclose large open-air areas, topped by grids of skylights, and with a projecting interior corner at the 2nd-4th floors, stacked above the corner entrance doors. In the middle of the north and south facades are three bays at the ground floor with plate-glass storefronts. The bay to the east is also recessed, but not to the degree as the west end bays; on the south facade on 52nd Street this bay has an entrance/exit to the underground parking garage. To the outside of the octagonal columns there is an additional 3-story section at the east end; on 52nd Street it has one narrow and two wide loading docks at the ground floor, and metal vents at the 2nd floor. The center bay of the three main middle bays is slightly recessed from the other two, and has three windows, while the other two bays each have two windows. Where the base ends at the top of the 4th floor, these two bays set back flush with the center bay for the rest of the facade, now spanning seven bays across each elevation.

There are two notched corners between each of the four facades, with window bands running horizontally across them. Above the 25th floor, there is a shallow setback and then two tiers of 2-story angled glass as the north, south, east, and west facades narrow to create four notches per corner. The windows change from rectangular to square at the 25th floor at each of the main facades, and narrow from seven to three at the 26th & 27th floors, with just a single square window at the middle of each facade at the 28th floor.

The ground floor is occupied by Azule Cantina restaurant on 52nd Street, and MoMA Design Store, and Fogo de Chao restaurant on 53rd Street.