General Motors Building (New York City, New York)

 office building, skyscraper, 1968_construction, International style architecture

705-foot, 50-story International-style office building completed in 1968. Designed by Edward Durell Stone and Emery Roth & Sons for General Motors, it was built on the site of the historic Savoy-Plaza Hotel. Occupying nearly a full city block, the building originally featured a showroom for the vehicles of General Motors in its street-level lobby. Then, until 2015 the south lobby was FAO Schwarz's flagship toy store, which was featured in the film Big and which won an award for its lighting in 2005. The north lobby is occupied by Cartier jewelers, taking over in 2014 the space previously used as a studio by CBS's The Early Show. Major office tenants include Abbott Downing, Estée Lauder, and Icahn Enterprises.

The tower's facades are clad in white marble and bronze-tinted glass and form a giant slab oriented east-west, with slight projections at the center of the north and south facades. A base is formed by two low, 2-story wings of metal and glass than run along the north and south sides and join around the east end on Madison Avenue. The base was partially re-clad with new, pale-green-tinted opaque glass along most of the east ends. At the west end of the tower is a plaza fronting Fifth Avenue,which was originally a sunken plaza. When the building was sold in 1998, the plaza was raised to grade, and after the building was sold again in 2003, a flagship Apple Store was built below the plaza, opening in 2006. The Apple Store entrance is a 32 ft. by 32 ft. by 32 ft. glass cube, likened to the Louvre Pyramid, and descent into the store is made via a glass elevator or a treaded spiral staircase surrounding it. This addition was designed by Apple and the firm of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. The plaza and Apple Store were rebuilt in 2017, doubling the retail space's size.

The main building entrances face onto the plaza on the west side, recessed behind the marble piers. The piers all have beveled edges and project out slightly from the window bays in between. The vertical window bays themselves also have beveled edges in the glass. The west and east elevations have ten of these narrow bays, while the north and south facades span 30 total bays. 12 of the middle bays are the ones the project north and south (by the width of one bay), with 10 outer bays to the west and 8 outer bays to the east. Toward the middle of the base on the north facade on 59th Street there are three large loading docks. The east end of the base was occupied by Mansur Gavriel leather goods, Tumi luggage, and a Chase Bank branch but was vacated for a temporary Cartier branch.

General Motors Corporation
(212) 418-6100
767 5th Ave, #16, New York, NY 10153