500 Park Tower (New York City, New York)

 office building, skyscraper, condominiums

466-foot, 40-story postmodern office/residential building completed in 1984. Designed by Polshek Partnership Architects (now Ennead Architects) and Schuman, Lichtenstein, Claman & Efron, its contextual design complements a modern landmark, the short office building at 500 Park Avenue on the southeast corner at 59th Street, built in 1960. The buildings are joined where they intersect. The first 11 floors of the newer building are offices and floors 12-40 have condominiums.

The subtlety of Polshek's design is in his brilliant massing and façade treatment and overall proportions. The tower's façade has a distinctly split personality with a silvery aluminum bay that runs up its east side to complement the low-rise office building, and the strongly delineated "matte" façade with incised windows on the other façade.

This section of facade is clad in thermal finish gray-green granite, contrasting with the sections of cantilevered aluminum and green glass that pay homage to the original building's design. The entrance is at the east end, where the two structures intersect, at the end of a long metal canopy that extends from the street to the recessed ground floor of the older bank building. A narrow black granite wall joins the two structures up the the lower building's roof line at the 10th floor. The granite facade of the newer tower projecting out farther toward the sidewalk, with a bay of small, square, incised windows on the short east-facing wall. The north facade is wide bays wide, with four storefronts and a loading dock at the west end.

Above the ground floor the east side of this facade has three incised square windows at each floor, while the west side has a projecting section of aluminum and glass curtain wall, cantilevered a few feet out from the main building line. This curtain wall extends up to the 10th floor, where it ends and the rest of the tower continues up flush. This is the transition from the office to residential floors, and has five bays of large windows. The floors above have 10 bays of incised windows, with the east bay wrapping around the corner to the east facade. The granite cladding ends at the west bay at the 27th floor, and at the next bay at the 34th floor, transitioning to metal-and-glass cladding that extends across the entire west facade, and the top two floors on the north facade, above the end of the granite cladding.

The south facade is almost entirely made up of curtain wall, with one narrow bay of granite with square windows at the east. Tacked onto the south part of the east facade is a projecting curtain wall section that cantilevers almost 25 feet over the shorter, older office building and extends up to the 36th floor. To the north of this projecting curtain wall section, the rest of the east facade is clad in granite and has four bays of windows, the northern one being a continuation of the wrap-around bay from the north facade.

The tower contains 56 condominium units.