Ralph Lauren Corporate Headquarters (New York City, New York)

 office building, movie / film / TV location, commercial building

360-foot (422 with spire), 27-story modernist office building originally completed in 1957 as an 8-story building for the C.I.T. Corporation, designed by Harrison & Abramovitz. In 1981, C.I.T. sold the building to Prudential Insurance and moved out two years later. It was remodeled and expanded with 19 additional floors in 1987, designed by Fox & Fowle Architects, and is also known as the C.I.T. Building. The Fox & Fowle design is quite brilliant for it not only is evocative to a certain degree of the high quality curtain wall that Harrison & Abramovitz had created on the original site but also of the Japanese aesthetic as simply but very effectively expressed in the building's crown

The facades are clad in a curtain wall of green glass above a 2-story base. The ground floor is clad in polished black granite (the west half of the south facade, the entire north facade, and most of the east facade), white marble (the remaining sections), stainless-steel, and glass. Storefronts with large plate-glass show-windows line the ground floor along the avenue, and also most of the south facade on 59th Street. At the west end the south facade has a secondary entrance with glass double-doors and steel service doors, a large loading dock with a roll-down metal gate, and another steel section with a set of service doors. The north facade on 60th Street has a short storefront section at the east end, followed by a steel service door, a smaller loading dock with a roll-down metal gate, a secondary entrance to a section of the building occupied by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (with glass double-doors framed by glass sidelights, below a stainless-steel canopy and next to a black granite panel), a small steel-and-glass storefront, and a steel section at the west end with two service doors. Around all three facades, the 2nd floor is recessed between the ground floor and curtain wall of the upper floors, clad in clear glass with thin steel mullions, creating a floating effect to the mass of the tower above. The 2-story main entrance is centered on the avenue, with a glass wall deeply recessed between the ground floor and 2nd-floor sections on either side. It has two sets of glass revolving doors framed by traditional glass doors, set between a pair of 2-story steel columns, and covered by a steel canopy at the 2nd floor.

The bulk of the building is L-shaped, and rises to the 7th, where there is a setback around all three main facade. There is another setback above the 10th floor at roughly the east half of the building, and the lower section terminates at the 11th floor at the south half of the building. The tower portion rises from the north section, above the first setback at the 8th floor, with the north and south ends of the east and west facades recessed from the middle sections of the tower. The north and south facades of the tower have setbacks above the 22rd & 25th floors, and the middle of the tower's east and west facades has a setback above the 25th floor as well, creating two narrow 2-story wings at the north and south ends of the tower that frame the green metal panels of the tower's long, narrow crown, the top of which hides the rooftop mechanical equipment, and the ends of which (at the east and west) are slightly rounded and bisected vertically with a silvery cylindrical shape seems to have impressed itself into the rounded shape, rising a short distance above the rest of the crown.

The sidewalk adjacent to the building was used as a filming location for White Collar S02 E04 "By the Book" where Neal and Mozzie discuss their meeting with an antiques dealer. The C.I.T. Building is possibly best known as Rachel's Office (Jennifer Aniston) in the popular sitcom "Friends" (1994 - 2004).

Besides the lobby and medical space, the ground floor is occupied by Tod's boutique, Moncler clothing store, and CELINE clothing store. The building is occupied by Ralph Lauren corporate offices,