425 Park Avenue (New York City, New York) | office building, skyscraper, Modern (architecture)

 office building, skyscraper, Modern (architecture)

893-foot, 47-story office building originally completed in 1957 as a 32-story building designed by Kahn & Jacobs. Beginning in 2015, the upper floors of the structure were completely disassembled, and the skeleton of the lower floors was reused as the base for a mostly new, modernist/futurist tower designed by Norman Foster+Partners, completed in 2022 for L&L Holding Company.

The new design is organized into three main sections, each separated by setbacks with recessed, triple-height garden terraces. These sky gardens feature cafes, bars and spaces for events, sheltered by discrete glazing. The ground floor has a central glass entrance opening into a glass-enclosed lobby with 45-foot-ceilings and mezzanine levels north and south. On 55th Street there is a 2-bay entrance to a "car lobby", line with white marble; it has two recessed garage doors to the underground parking garage.

Facing the avenue the 7-story base section has five main bays and two end bays divided by projecting steel piers. The front side of the terrace topping the base is enclosed by a sloping diagrid of glass; at the north and south sides there are exposes, diagonal-sloping white structural braces. The narrower mid-section spans six bays, with similar cladding and piers. The upper tower section is even narrower, spanning five bays on the west facade.

The east facade consists of a building core clad in white pre-cast concrete with two columns of glazed stairwells at the center. The core section is narrower than the rest of the glass-clad tower. A very tall glass parapet tops the upper section of the main offices. Behind this, three dramatic concrete fins jut about 200 feet above the roof level to crown the tower. While the structurally-expressed floor stacks pay homage to its International Style predecessors, the fins have an Art-Deco flair.

In 2022, the hedge fund Citadel signed a lease for 415,000 square feet or 60% of the building. The lobby contains a 39ft mural by Sol LeWitt entitled "Bars of Colors Within Squares".

www.425parkave.com/


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