Springs Mills Building

 office building, movie / film / TV location, Modern (architecture)

285-foot, 21-story International-style/Early Modern office building completed in 1963. Designed by Harrison & Abramowitz as the former headquarters of the Springs Cotton Mills, it sits on an L-shaped lot with frontages on both 39th and 40th Streets, rising to a thin glass hexagonal tower. The two facades span two eras of zoning: the south entrance on West 39th Street, designed shortly before the city’s old 1919 zoning rules were revised, fills the width of the lot and has two horizontal setbacks. The more distinctive north facade, with its impressively skinny hexagonal tower, anticipates new zoning rules that encouraged a more slender silhouette. It can be seen from Bryant Park.

The building is an early example of a glass curtain wall, with its panes of green-tinted glass and aluminum mullions. Both dark grey and silver, these slim mullions were deliberately arranged to enhance the building’s verticality. The hexagonal tower, on the other hand, was shaped by practical and artistic considerations: not only did the elongated configuration allow sunlight to reach what would have normally been lot-line windows on the upper floors, but this unusual massing gives the structure a unique and distinctive identity. On the south facade, the ground floor has two storefronts, a service bay, and a deeply-recessed entrance, set behind a row of four stainless-steel columns. Each column consists of two hexagonal sections that bear a resemblance to the building’s tower. Like the side elevations, the outer face of each column is divided by a vertical line. The first of the two setbacks occurs above the 6th floor, with the second above the 12th floor, on the west side.

The building is now owned by two investment firms and occupied by lawyers, software makers, textile companies and the Morocco National Tourist Office. It was given a landmark designation in 2010, one of the few modernist-style buildings to be so named. The building attained some notoriety in 2007 when it featured as the location for the fictitious CIA anti-terrorism field office in the last of the Jason Bourne trilogy of spy genre films - "The Bourne Ultimatum". The ground floor on 39th Street is occupied by Stout NYC pub.

s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/2385.pdf