Bloomberg - 120 Park (New York City, New York)

 office building, skyscraper, postmodern (architecture)

361-foot, 26-story postmodern office building completed in 1983. Designed by Ulrich Franzen & Associates for the Philip Morris Tobacco Company, the austere style of the building nods to the International Style with hints to Classicism, and features a light-grey granite facade.

The 42nd Street side has a tall colonnade of five columns creating a deep, 3-story sheltered bay. At the recessed wall, there is an entrance left of center, topped by a tall 3-over-2 expanse of windows, above which a curving silver metal panel angles forward as it meets the ceiling. There is a band of windows at the ground level to the left of the entrance, and a subway entrance projecting forward (just behind the columns) to the right, with a low concrete wall topped by glass. Almost midway up the tall entrance bay are three projecting, squared, silver metal canopies, one to the left and two to the right of the entrance area.

The south side on 41st Street has another 3-story recessed bay, but only cutting into the east half of the facade, and only framed by two columns at the corners. The rear exposure of this bay features a glass wall with glass doors at the bottom, leading into the triple-height lobby. The west half of the south facade has a small service door, a large loading dock, and a small garage door with roll-down metal gate at the ground floor. The two floors above have pairs of large, black metal vents.

The wider, front facade facing Park Avenue spans seven bays, with the two end bays opening into the 3-story recessed areas at both ends, and the middle bays consisting of heavy, squared columnwork with wide openings of glass infill at the ground floor, subdivided into pairs of window openings at the 2nd level. There is another entrance at the center. At the top of the base there is a large, central, incised, granite square, above which on either side extends a row of five smaller squares.

Above the base the east facade on the avenue consists of 19 narrow bays of paired windows, with slightly-projecting granite piers between each bay, and narrower intermediate piers between the paired windows.The smallish pairs of windows have dark-grey-tinted glass. Near the top there is a 13-bay-wide, 2-story opening, with the street-level columns (rounded here, four in total) continuing through the front of this recessed area. At the top floor, the seven middle bays have double-height windows., and a roof parapet extends up higher at the 15 middle bays than the four end bays.

On the north and south facades there are bands of windows alternating with grey stone spandrels. There are also recessed openings near the tops, both three stories tall and divided by three squared columns into four bays. The foundations consist of four basement levels which were designed to accommodate a number of subway tunnels that extend throughout the site.

The former Philip Morris Building was renamed the Altria Building in 2003, following the renaming of Philip Morris given the negative associations with cigarette manufacturing companies. In 2008, building was sold after the company moved to Richmond, Virginia, and adopted its address as name. When the building changed ownership, Altria donated a series of Haas murals titled "Cityscape" to the N-Y Historical which had been on display in the employee cafeteria.

The current building replaced the low, Art-Deco-styled Airlines Terminal Building, and before that, the 1906 Belmont Hotel. Bloomberg L.P. has since signed a lease for 16 floors of space and became the principal occupant. On the ground floor there is a public garden, a café, and until 2008, an annex of the Whitney Museum of Modern Art housing temporary exhibitions.

www.bloomberg.com/company/offices/bloombergs-new-york-o...
archive.org/details/onethousandnewyo0000broc/page/201/m...