461 Fifth Avenue

 office building, skyscraper, postmodern (architecture)

376-foot, 25-story Postmodern office building completed in 1989. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for Mitsui Fudosan, the building's exterior uses a pre-cast concrete finish to mimic the appearance of limestone, with metal elements and a copper mansard roof. The 8-story base has five bays on both main facades, with a rounded corner bay facing the intersection. The ground floor piers are banded, resting on black granite bases. All of the ten side bays have storefronts of black metal with gold accents and plate-glass show-windows. The storefronts are recessed between the piers, but have projecting bay windows (short angled side panes and larger center panes extending out to meet the building line). These are divided into upper and lower sections, separated by black and gold metal spandrels with alternating pediments of either rounded or triangular style. The upper sections above the pediments lack the metal framing between the three panes of the bay windows that are seen at the lower level. At the corner bay, the main entrance is completely glassed-in, with thin brass framing, and covered by a projecting, fan-shaped black and gold metal canopy, above which the upper part of the ground-floor corner bay is rounded, with a band of five window panes. A cornice caps the base, accented with simple black squares at each pier.

At the east end, on 40th Street, there is a courtyard extending back the length of two bays, and two bays in width. The eastern elevation of the tower, facing the courtyard, has two additional storefronts, both with triangular pediments, and glass entrance doors at the lower levels. The rear and west-facing walls of the courtyard have matching banded piers at the ground floor, visually divided into two levels. The spaces between the piers have blank pre-cast infill, except for the two lower bays on the rear wall, which are lighter in color and scored into grids. The upper floors of the rear courtyard wall have multiple horizontal and vertical lines carving the surface up into a grid-like pattern along the floorplates. These somewhat mimic the upper floors of the base, where the piers and spandrels are split into paired recessed panels. The main bays of the base have paired windows, and the rounded corner bay has a curving band of five panes at each floor; the base is capped by a heavy cornice. The two bays of the east facade facing the courtyard match, with the southern bay ending at the top of the base, and the next bay continuing up the set-back upper tower.

From the base rises a set-back, semi-cylindric turquoise glass tower, enframed on each corner by a bay with square columns of the same style as the base, connected by impressive neo-classical steel bracing girders. These trusses are intriguing and ornamental on a larger-than-normal scale, located on each facade at the 10th, 14th, 18th, and 22nd floors. The paired-window end bays stop at the 23rd floor, with the slightly-bowed glass facades continuing up to the main roof line, capped by the high-sloped mansard.