4 Columbus Circle

 office building, commercial building

8-story office building completed in 1987. Designed by Swanke Hayden Connell, it is clad in limestone and glass. The east facade on the avenue has four main bays at the lower two floors, organized into eight smaller bays on the upper floors. There are metal-and-glass storefronts on the ground floor, each bisected by a round, light-grey granite column and topped by a granite band, except for the 2nd bay from the north, which has a double-height recessed opening with the main entrance. It has glass double-door, and there is a vertical, white metal lattice-like structure extending from above the doors out to just past the building line, and then continuing up the facade as a single thin metal bar with many short connecting bars attaching it to the facade surface, running all the way up past the roof line. The other three bays at the 2nd floor have wide windows with square end panes and a center window divided into 2-over-2 smaller square, all topped by a grey metal lintel.

The 3rd floor has eight separate square windows, and the floors above have larger openings filled by the same size square windows, but surrounded by narrow side panes and green metal panels above and below. Thin, grey aluminum mullions divide the various elements in each bay. At the 7th floor, four of the piers are replaced by rounded columns, and the narrow side panes abutting these columns are recessed. The main roof line is above the 7th floor, with the 3rd & 4th bays from the north, as well as a half-bay on either side, extending up to the 8th floor, which is clad in a curtain wall of glass with green and grey metal.

The north facade on 58th Street has five wide bays and a smaller bay 2nd from the west. The wide bays all have storefronts like those on the east facade at the ground floor, while the smaller bay has a recessed service entrance behind a metal gate. The upper floors also match those on the east facade. Another thin white metal pole, with numerous short metal attaching arms, runs up the facade near the west edge of the 2nd bay from the west. Above the 7th-floor roof line it expands into a metal screen that runs diagonally across the roof and set-back 8th floor level, extending to the matching element on the east facade, thus giving the impression of a metal screen bisecting the building at an angle.

The building is home to Steelcase Inc., a global office furniture manufacturer, which owned the entire building at one time, but now just leases roughly 76,000 square feet. The ground floor is occupied by a Starbucks coffee, and a Duane-Reade pharmacy.