Deutsche Bank Center (New York City, New York)

750-foot, 55-story postmodern multi-use building complex completed in 2004 for Time Warner, Apollo Global Management, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Palladium Company, and the Related Companies. Designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it consists of two very similar trapezoidal towers bridged by a 7-story atrium containing upscale retail shops that curves to wrap around the west side of Columbus Circle. Construction began in November 2000, following the demolition of the New York Coliseum, and a topping-out ceremony was held on February 27, 2003. The Shops at Columbus Circle was designed by Elkus Manfredi Architects.

Starting construction as the AOL Time Warner Center, the total floor area of 2.8 million ft² is is divided between offices, residential condominiums, and the Mandarin Oriental New York hotel. The Shops at Columbus Circle is an upscale shopping mall located in a curving arcade at the base of the building, with a large Whole Foods Market grocery store in the basement. A third of the office space is used for the headquarters of Warner Media, formerly known as Time Warner (the name changed after AT&T Inc. purchased Time Warner in 2018). The offices also contains an R&D Center for VMware and a 1,200 seat theater for Jazz at Lincoln Center as well as CNN studios, from where Anderson Cooper 360° and Piers Morgan Tonight among other shows, are broadcast live.

A 7-story cable-net wall of glass serves as the entrance to the atrium where the center's two 55-story towers intersect, recessed between the two curving, flanking wings. Spanning 98 feet across and 160 feet high, the cable structure was the largest in North America at the time of its completion. There is an entrance to the 59th Street – Columbus Circle station of the New York City Subway near Columbus Circle's south end. The retail base is clad in light-grey granite and glass. There are five wide bays on the curving section to the south of the main entrance, and one bay to the north. At the north end of the circle there is an east-northeast-facing section of the base, three bays wide, that is not curved, and follows the line of Broadway splitting off the circle. The 7th floor of the base is slightly set back, and clad in glass and metal. The five bays along the curved south section are each angled back at the north ends, creating a serrated profile. At the south end of the base a 7-story blade of clear glass extends out, overhanging the silver steel-clad end of the ground floor.

At the northeast corner of the base, the lower three floors are set back under an angled cutout, with a glass curtain wall extending down and out to the building line on the east face of the 2nd-4th floors, where the entrance to the Jazz at Lincoln Center Rose Hall is located (at the ground floor below an angular stainless-steel canopy). The base continues along 60th Street on the north side (now six floors tall), with a 2-story recessed entry for 60 Columbus Circle (the north tower office lobby), and a wider, 1-story entry to the west for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, below a large stainless-steel canopy. Three projecting flagpoles mounted at the top of the ground floor separate the two entrances. At the far west end the base drops down the only three floors (clad in grey stone), and the ground floor has an entrance/exit for the underground parking garage, and a loading dock. The east part of the base's north facade has bands of windows on the upper three floors, alternating with grey stone cladding. Horizontal metal ribs run across the glass band on the 4th floor.

Along 58th Street, the south facade of the base has dark-grey stone and metal cladding on the ground floor, with an open-air pedestrian passage through the ground floor near the slender southeast corner. To the west is an entrance to the retail spaces, recessed at an angle, with a clear-glass curtain wall above at the 2nd-3rd floors, exposing a framework of white metal tubing. The recessed entrance to the residential lobby of the south tower is to the left, partially covered by a stainless-steel canopy. The angled east wall, and an adjoining section of the non-angled ground floor next to it feature silver metal cladding with an interesting pattern of extruded diamond shapes with plantings on the upper surfaces of each. Farther west is the entrance to the office lobby, set in a 3-story cabled-glass wall. The 2nd & 3rd floors of the base are clad in blue-green metal panels up to this point; the west end is clad in the same light-grey stone as elsewhere on the base, with two loading docks at the far end.

Much as the curving base is designed to contextually embrace the edge of the traffic circle, the void between the soaring towers helps visually restore the 59th Street corridor, blocked since the 1950s. The towers, clad in blue glass, are both parallelograms, whose façades follow both the street grid and Broadway. The obtuse and acute angles create slipping, illusory shapes that make the towering forms look dynamic. The south tower has a wide base rising from the podium to the 21st floor, angled to the east-northeast. The north tower has a similar base, but angled east-southeast, and also has an extra wedge at the front, at a sharper angle, that ends at the 16th floor. The main masses of the towers rise from the inner edge of these wider bases, extending from the tops as parallelograms both aligned with Broadway. Lining the northwest and southeast corners of the north tower and northeast and southwest corners of the south tower midsections are narrow vertical bays of horizontal black metal spandrels grouped into clusters of three at each floor. These ends at a final shallow setback below the top floors. At the crowns, there are rows of overlapping, angled, vertical fins (six on each of the wider west and east facades of both towers) lining the top floors.

This is the location of the apartment where the finale of the film "Cloverfield" takes place, in which one of the two towers has collapsed onto the other. The building complex has several street addresses, including the 'upmarket address' (as above) of One Central Park, as used primarily by the residential condominium component, 10 Columbus Circle for the offices, 25 Columbus Circle for the south tower that was also originally named "One Central Park" and 80 Columbus Circle for The Residences at Mandarin Oriental. The Time Warner Center contains 130 condominium units.

It was renamed and rebranded as the Deutsche Bank Center in 2021.

www.theshopsatcolumbuscircle.com/
www.elkus-manfredi.com/project/shops-columbus-circle/

Categories: office building, skyscraper, condominiums, 2004_construction