Times Square Tower (New York City, New York)

 office building, skyscraper, 2004_construction

726-foot, 49-story office building completed in 2004. Designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Times Square Tower benefits from special zoning which results in uniform floor sizes and panoramic views from every floor. Some of the most prominent features of the Times Square Tower are its arrays of billboards. Most of the large signs are found near the base, but one 4-story video board is found above the middle of the building, on the north facade.

The tower is clad in a curtain wall of blue-green glass with light-grey spandrel bands on the west facade and sections of the south and east facades. Solid bands in the south and east facade contain thin diagonal lines, and a series of slightly accentuated 'zig zags' from the base of the tower to its roof enhance its verticality. The main entrance is at the center of the east facade on Broadway, with glass infill containing three sets of revolving doors flanked by a pair of regular doors. An angled, grey metal canopy covers the entrance, above which a glass-enclosed atrium extends to the 5th floor, revealing the structural cross-bracing behind the glass. This center section is framed on the left by a broad grey-metal pier, and on the right by an angled grey metal pier, sloping to the north and then running horizontally below the 5th floor, on which the glass from the center section continues. The north and south ends of the Broadway facade have ground-floor storefronts topped by large signboards from the 2nd-4th floors. The north facade on 42nd Street, narrower than the south due to the angle of Broadway, has an enclosed subway entrance on the ground floor, with the rest of the base above covered by signboard of various sizes. The subway entrance continues onto the north end of the west facade, with red-metal framing on the glass walls and a wavy metal canopy on top. Two more large storefronts fill the middle and south parts of the west facade, and four signboards are mounted above, the largest at the north, covering up to the 5th floor; the next board extends from the 3rd-4th floors, and the two southern ones span from the 2nd-3rd floors. The middle of the south facade's ground floor is faced in grey metal panels, with service doors and two freight docks, one wide and one narrower, each with roll-down metal gates. The ends have continuations of the storefronts from the west and east facades. There are metal louvers on the 2nd-4th floors at the west end, and more on the 3rd & 4th floors across the middle. The tower's 2nd, 3rd, 48th & 49th floors are mechanical floors.

The west facade has a slightly-projecting section near the north end, at the bottom half that features the light-grey spandrel bands seen on the east facade, instead of the thin diagonals on the rest of the elevation. On the north facade, the west side has the stripes of grey spandrels, with three areas of glass without spandrels that wrap around to the west facade. The east end has diagonal metal beams zig-zagging up the wall with horizontal beams every four floors. The north and west facades set back before the west and south sides, which continue in a triangle shape. The glass curtain wall of both the south and east sides angles down toward the southeast corner, exposing the grey metal cladding of the mechanical screening at the top. The ground floor is occupied by LOFT women's clothing store, Pink Taco restaurant, and The Counter burger restaurant.