Squibb Building

 commercial, office building, skyscraper, Art Deco (architecture), 1931_construction

435-foot, 34-story Art-Deco office building completed in 1931. Designed by Buchman & Kahn and Sherley W. Morgan, it was formerly known as the Squibb Building. It was redone in colored marble in 1988--originally to honor Kahn's supposed original intentions, thwarted by Depression Era cutbacks, then, when it turned out Kahn very much wanted a white building here, just because the owners didn't like white marble. The lobby features a ceiling mural by Arthur Covey featuring stylized airplanes flying over Manhattan.

The bottom two floors are clad in black polished granite, with white marble infill at four of the six bays along the avenue. These four have plate-glass show-window at the ground floor, with bronze framing extending up through the 2nd floor where a horizontal stainless-steel band caps the bay. Sloped, black canvas awnings cover the show-windows. The 3rd bay from the north contains the main entrance to the Bergdorf Goodman Men's Store, with a 2-story wall of glass infill with bronze framing and a matching steel band at the top. At the bottom there are two glass doors flanking a central revolving door. At the southern bay is the main entrance to the lobby, deeply recessed in a vestibule, with two sets of revolving doors flanking a central double-door, all framed in limestone. The ceiling of the vestibule has multiple murals by Arthur Covey, and the walls are lined by horizontal light fixtures. At the front of the vestibule, at the 2nd floor, is a steel and bronze screen with Art-Deco geometric designs. There are two flagpoles projecting in alternate directions from a single mount above the entrance. Each of the piers between these bays are ornamented with narrow, vertical bronze ribs that have thin, rectangular light fixtures at their bases, and small square panels interlocking with a diamond shape at the tops.

The base on the north facade has a similar design, except the ten bays have narrower bronze-framed show-windows. There is another store entrance in the 5th bay from the west, with recessed bronze-and-glass doors flanking a revolving door, set under a round-arch. A rounded, black canvas canopy extends out over the sidewalk. The eastern end bay has steel-and-bronze service doors with metal louvers above them.

The rest of the 6-story base is clad in limestone, except for the southernmost bay on the avenue, where the black granite continues up to the termination of this bay at the 6th floor. The 3rd-5th floors here have narrow triple-windows framed and separated by grey metal mullions, with black glass spandrels between floors. The other bays have tripartite windows at the 3rd-5th floor and are separated by fluted piers. The middle parts of the tripartite windows themselves have separates narrow end panes, and each section has a transom divided into smaller rectangular panes. There are dark-green marble spandrel panels between floors within each bay, with the larger central spandrel in each bay decorated by a black stone roundel that telescopes forward slightly toward the center. The 6th floor is dominated by large, square window openings, framed in metal and overlaid by metal diamond shapes with inscribed circles. The piers between the bays are smooth, but project slightly. The transitional 7th floor is also limestone, with two single-windows in each bay (an arrangement that continues on the light-grey brick upper floors), and projecting panels on the piers.

On the north facade on 58th Street there is a setback above the 6th floor in the center, creating a shallow light well between two wings; it is one bay deep, with two single-windows on the inward-facing sidewalls. The brick upper floors at the east end begin a series of shallow, cascading setbacks above the 6th, 9th, 12th, & 15th floor, ending in a lower roof line at the 17th floor that contains an outdoor terrace. The rest of the main bulk of the tower is framed by the two wings on the north side, each two bays wide, with a 3-bay section in the middle, where the brick spandrels are textured.

At the 14th floor the wings have a narrow string course that continues along the west facade; above there is a very shallow setback, and the next two floors have vertical grooves on the piers (except for the end piers). The wings terminate in setbacks at the 16th floor, with the north and west facades rising flush above them. Here the north facade spans 13 single-windows, and the west facade has eight. There are higher setbacks above the 23rd & 26th floors, above which there are wider end piers. The top of the tower culminates in two more setbacks, both marked by projecting geometric patterns at the piers. There is a small, flat roof with mechanical equipment on top, and a tall, vertical flagpole attached to the west end.

The south and east elevations are also brick, with matching single-windows. The base was renovated in the early 2000s, and now the bottom three floors along side are occupied by the menswear section of Bergdorf Goodman's Department Store, the main store building for which lies directly across Fifth Avenue.

archive.org/details/architecture-monthly_1931-03_63_3/p...
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usmodernist.org/AM/AM-1934-12.pdf
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