New York Times Building

 office building, skyscraper, newspaper publisher, interesting place, 2007_construction, Modern (architecture)

1,046-foot (including spire), 52-story modernist office building completed in 2007. Designed by Renzo Piano and FXFowle, its roof line is at 748 feet, with the glass fins of the exterior parapet wall extending up to 840 feet. The interior was designed by Gensler.

This is the New York Times' seventh headquarters since its founding in 1851. It occupies the first 28 floors, with the rest of the offices rented out to other companies. The top two floors consists of mechanical space and a rooftop conference facility. The building, cruciform in plan, occupies the entire block front on the east side of Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets, anchoring the southwest corner of the Times Square area. The main entrance is on Eighth Avenue with two additional entrances from 40th and 41st Street. The building is set back 17 feet along Eighth Avenue and eight feet along 40th and 41st Street in order to facilitate pedestrian circulation. The familiar "The New York Times" nameplate above the 8th Avenue entry is printed in its custom Old English-style font at a 10,166-pt. size.

This is the first high-rise building in the United States to have a ceramic sunscreen over a glass curtain wall. Low-iron ultra-clear glass is draped with 186,000, 4-foot 10-inch light-grey ceramic rods resulting in a curtain wall that appears to change color according to ambient lighting conditions. The ceramic rods are placed on a steel framework positioned one to two feet in front of the glass; in other places the screen is made of metal and glass louvers. The irregularly spaced horizontal rods bounce daylight up to the ceilings, tossing it into the tower's interior. On each panel the rods are interrupted at eye level, creating an open viewing space so those inside the building will not be seeing the city behind bars. The sunscreen starts at the second floor, leaving the first open, transparent and permeable; glass-enclosed retail spaces along the ground floor allow passers-by to view activity in the lobby and ground-floor-level garden. The rod spacing increases from the base to the top, adding transparency as the building rises. The steel framing and bracing is exposed at the four corner "notches" of the building.

At the top of the building the screen of tubes becomes less dense, and its lace-like appearance permits a view of the roof garden foliage. The curtain wall continues skyward above the roof to conceal the building's mechanical elements and maintain the visual flow of the tower. To increase the sense of interoffice community within the tower, as well as animate its edges, Piano pulled away the sunscreens and placed the staircases, sheathed in transparent panes, at the buildings notched corners.

Nighttime lighting reinforces the New York Times Building’s elegance through a precise gradation of light: brightest at the base of the tower and tapering to a soft glow at its summit. Luminaires equipped with state-of-the-art optics were used to stretch illumination across the entire 850’ tall facade. To meet Times Square District requirements for providing an animated façade, select luminaires above pedestrian level are painted “taxi-yellow”—a cultural reference to midtown traffic.

A tall, thin mast rises above an illuminated roof terrace. Besides the lobby spaces, the ground floor is occupied by Schnipper's Quality Kitchen, and a Starbucks coffee.


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