United States Plywood Building (New York City, New York)

 office building, skyscraper

472-foot, 38-story International-style office building completed in 1963. Designed by William Lescaze, it is clad in a curtain wall of dark-grey steel and dark-tinted glass. The ground floor is slightly recessed behind the piers on all three main facades, with plate-glass infill. The west facade on the avenue is divided into seven bays, with the middle three more deeply recessed, with white marble side walls and revolving glass doors. The south facade has six narrower bays, with a loading dock and service entrance in the eastern two, which have black metal infill. The north facade on 49th Street is five bays wide, with an entrance to the underground parking garage in the east bay.

Above the ground floor, there are four or five panes of glass to each bay, divided by thin metal mullions. There are deep setbacks on the north, west, and south facades above the 12th floor, with the upper portion of the tower rising as a smaller, rectangular box atop the base, with the same cladding. On the east facade, with lower floors are faced in white glazed brick with bands of four windows in the three southern bays that project out further to the east than the rest of the building. At the north end there are two more bands of four windows, and a bay of single-windows closer to the center. The brick surface extends up the middle of the upper portion of the tower on the east side, with the edges continuing the metal-and-glass curtain wall from the other facades. Two bays of single-windows (the south one narrower) run up the brick middle section, near the edges. Atop the main setbacks, the upper tower's bottom floor is recessed, with the floors above supported by piers than extend straight down to the lower base. Just below the roof line is a double-height mechanical floor with black metal vents in place of the regular curtain wall. Besides the lobby, the ground floor is occupied by an HSBC Bank branch, and a Lenscrafters.

The expansive outdoor plaza is costructed of terrazo tiles and planted with ginko trees. It is marked by two sculptures: Beverly Pepper’s dynamic, rotating stainless steel Contrapunto in front of the entrance, and Theodore Ceraldi’s pop-art Big Red Swing. The building’s lobby is a classic – soaring ceiling’s book-leafed marble walls, terrazzo floors and elevator banks paneled with East Indian laurel wood.

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