40 West 57th Street (New York City, New York)

 office building, skyscraper, commercial building

428-foot, 34-story modernist/International-style office building completed in 1972. Designed by Jack Brown, it was originally called the Squibb Building. The pharmaceutical company merged in 1989 with Bristol-Myers, and remained in the building until 2002. In 2001-2002, Kohn Pederson Fox led a renovation and redesign of the former Squibb building involving completely rebuilding the two tower podiums, renovation of a covered through-block pedestrian arcade connecting 56th & 57th Streets, reconfiguration of the main lobby, and upgrades to vertical transportation and security systems.

Along 57th Street there is a 2-story arcade of retail storefronts organized into eight bays. Each has a large, projecting, grey metal-clad planter box at the top, supported by pairs of squared, stainless-steel columns. The 3rd bay from the west has the open-air, through-block pedestrian arcade, lined with stainless-steel piers. The bays to the left and right house double-height lobby space behind plate-glass infill, and the eastern bays have retail storefronts of metal and glass. Within the arcade is Nobu 57, a 2-level 13,000-square-foot restaurant.

Set back above the western six bays, the north facade of the tower is clad in a curtain wall of bronze-tinted glass, darker at the glass spandrels between floors. The curtain wall is framed by concrete at the ends, and has black metal vents at the mechanical floors at the 13th and top floors. The east elevation of the north building section has wider concrete end sections with horizontal grooves at each floor, and a narrower glass curtain wall in the center.

The south facade fronting 56th Street matches the north facade, only somewhat narrower, except for at the 2-story base, which has concrete paneling across the top. At the west end is a small storefront area, occupied by Benihana restaurant on both floors. To the right is a recessed entrance/exit to the underground parking garage, framed by brown brick. The east part of the base is occupied by a Benihana restaurant on both floors, fronted by a patio seating area covered by a low-sloped red canvas awning, and the far east end is the south opening to the pedestrian arcade. The south-facing elevation of the north-east section of the building, rising behind a couple of smaller buildings on 56th Street, has the same design as the other main north and south facades. The east-facing elevation of the south wing has concrete paneling at the south and a narrow curtain wall section at the north, near where it joins the north-east wing.

The narrow south section of the west elevation matches the east-facing section of the north-east wing, and the wider north section of the west elevation, set farther back, has no window openings, but only concrete paneling with horizontal grooves.