The Swiss Center

 office building, Art Deco (architecture), 1932_construction

12-story Art-Deco/Art-Moderne office building completed in 1932. It was designed by Victor L.S. Hafner but modified to exhibit the supporting skeletal frame devised by the engineering firm of E. H. Faile & Co. Metalwork was executed by the General Bronze Corp. It was formerly known as the Goelet Building, after Ogden Goelet, who died in his mansion on this site in 1897. His widow died in 1929, when the house was razed for development. Part of Goelet's wealth came from Chemical Bank and his descendant Robert Goelet decided to replace the mansion on the site when Rockefeller Center began construction. The building was designed to be used either as a store or a combination of office and retail uses and to maximize his retail space, he cantilevered much of the construction.

The spare horizontality of the lower stories' glazed curtain walls suggest that, stylistically, this building is a transitional monument between the Art-Deco and the International Style. The massing of the building is quite sophisticated with two wings separated by a light well on the sidestreet. The wings have corner setbacks and are joined by a taller, recessed mechanical penthouse.

It is clad in contrasting deep green and white Dover cream marble -- all accented by aluminum trim. The 2-story base was redesigned in 1966 by Lester Tichy Associates. It is fronted by a curtain wall of glass and verde antique marble. Juxtaposed one-over-one windows and spandrels of Dover cream marble articulate each of the upper seven office floors. The 10th floor and the 2-story penthouse (set back at the south end of the main roof) are revetted with the verde antique marble. Vertical ribs, of alternating widths, of the verde antique marble, rise up each bay of the upper seven floors. The broader central pair determine the 10th floor dormer above each bay.

These ribs rise from corbels attached to the broad, green marble surface masking the large girders of the cantilevered platform behind it and traverse the white marble office floors till they reach the 10th and penthouse level parapets. The wider ribs are capped with panels incised with stylized foliate motifs. The three thin ribs between these broad ribs terminate as fin-like elements on the 10th-floor coping. The penthouse (originally Robert Goelet's office) and utility housing, faced with the verde antique, have Dover cream trim.

Carved, decorative, heraldic detail ornaments the extreme ends of the vertical ribs -- on top within the panels that served as capitals of the broader ribs, on don the corbels at their point of origin. The broader corbels are enriched with stylized, foliate forms carved in low relief. The central element carved in the two broad corbels on the Fifth Avenue facade (just below the flagpole bases) is the Goelet crest -- the swan -- above the entwined "G"s monogram. The window and corner mullions as well as the moldings, copings and the frieze around the top of the penthouse are bronzed aluminum; all are vertically fluted or reeded except the 9th-floor coping which is horizontally fluted.

Only four years after the Goelet Building was completed, plans for an addition at 6 West 49th Street were announced, replacing an older rowhouse. Initially to be five stories, the addition was built as four. Again Faile designed the structure to accommodate both retail and office use. The contrasting horizontal green and vertical white marble elements were repeated but the corbel carving lacks the intricacy of the earlier work.

In 1964 the building was leased to the Swiss Center, with the alterations to the base occurring the following year. The majority of the work was on the interior. A more recent renovation replaced the plate-glass show-windows.

s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/1810.pdf
s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/1811.pdf
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