623 Fifth Avenue

 office building, skyscraper, interesting place, movie / film / TV location, 1990_construction, postmodern (architecture)

561-foot, 36-story postmodern office building completed in 1990. Designed by Lee Harris Pomeroy Associates and Abramovitz Kingsland Schiff for Swiss Bank and Saks Fifth Avenue, it was built as an extension at the east end of the existing 10-story department store, with the lower nine floors serving as additional space for Saks Fifth Avenue and a base for the office tower rising above.

The tower is clad in flat limestone panels with a pattern of punched recessed windows, a design that respects the surrounding context - it continues the store's classic motifs on the street facades while acknowledging Rockefeller Center with its own modern front. The tower's chamfered corners recall those of the older Saks Fifth Avenue store, and the design, utilizing smooth Indiana limestone cladding, is compatible with the historic landmark and traditional materials of New York's famed Fifth Avenue. Along with changing the name from Swiss Bank Tower when it was sold in 2002, the address was changed from 10 West 50th Street to 623 Fifth Avenue.

With the first nine floors housing an eastward extension of Saks, amounting to a 30 percent increase in selling area, the 10th floor has separate mechanical systems for the store below and the office building above. It also has five steel trusses, 26 feet high, that support a portion of the tower and allow for column-free floors in Saks. The 11th and 12th floors serve as a sky lobby, cafeteria and conference center.

The new structure's compatibility with the older department store's facade was achieved not by a minimal or abstract reference to massing and color, but by a virtual replication of Saks's 2-story fluted pilasters topped by leafy capitals, its rosettes, rustication, dentiled molding, wave-form scrollwork and anthemion-filled friezes on the north facade. The west three bays very closely follow the established design, differing only in the absence of architraves and balustrades in the spandrels between the 2nd & 3rd floors; here double-height windows fill both floors. The middle of these three bays has another entrance to the department store, matching the original entrance farther to the west. A double-wide, recessed bay at the left contains the main entrance to the office building in a 3-story portal. The ground level has three sets of bronze-and-glass doors (revolving in the middle), topped by bronze-and-glass panels fronting a large, pink marble sheet. Large, grey metal numbers and smaller letters attached to horizontal metal beams span the recessed bay, just above the doors; these spell out "623 FIFTH AVENUE". The five bays of the 4th-7th floors also match the existing bays from the original building.

On the south facade on 49th Street is recessed far back from the sidewalk, except for two ground-level wings at the sides. Both are faced in limestone with grey granite water tables, and have recessed lower sections at the inner-facing walls, with a single round column on a square, grey granite base supporting the upper part. The west wing has a loading dock, and the narrower east wing has a small circular window positioned where the water table meets the limestone. The west-facing inner wall of the east wing has a secondary entrance with glass double-doors. The rear wall, also limestone, serves as the backdrop of a small plaza created by the wings, both of which are topped by simple, projecting stone cornices with modillions, surmounted by modernist bronze railings. The only openings in the lower part of the south facade's rear wall is a double-height Saks entrance that matches those on the Fifth Avenue facade, flanked by a pair of display-windows.

A modillioned stone band course above the 3rd level on the south facade signals the beginning of the tower portion of the building, with six bays of punched square windows in the north and south facades. The 11th-12th floors have double-height openings with mechanical screens. On the north facade, there is a setback above the 7th floor, and double-height windows at both the 10th-11th and 12th-13th floors. Beginning at the 15th floor, the four corners of the tower are chamfered, each with a single punched window.

Saks's escalators also had a role in shaping the tower. They are at the rear of the existing store and the new structure wraps around slightly to embrace them. To get an unbroken wall on the west facade of the tower would have required that its central portion be cantilevered over the escalators, an engineering feat that would have been complex and expensive. Instead, the tower was given a deeply recessed central bay above the escalator bank. There are four punched windows on either side of the recessed central section, which has bands of dark-tinted windows at each floor, angling back to a deeper recess in the very middle. The recessed central section widens above the 21st floor, with one of the punched windows on either side falling off in a setback. This wider recess continues up to the lower roof line.

There are setbacks from the lower roof line on the north, west, and south sides, while the east facade rises up shear to the upper roof line, created by a triple-height mechanical penthouse that is also clad in limestone and also has chamfered corners. There is a band of blind windows along the bottom of the mechanical penthouse's west elevation, continuing the recessed bay. The rear, east elevation is also clad in limestone, but is less visible due its proximity to the nearby 444 Madison Avenue building of similar height. This facade has a bay of single-windows at the north and south ends, and no openings in the middle.

The interior has been used as a filming location for "Billions" and "Mr. Robot".

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