Park Millennium

 skyscraper, condominium, 1994 construction, commercial building

545-foot, 46-story modernist mixed-use building completed in 1994. Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, Schuman Lichtenstein Claman & Efron, and Handel Architects, it was originally known as Lincoln Square Millennium Tower. The building is clad with orange, dark red and charcoal brick and aluminum and glass. While the textured masonry is not exquisite, the massing of the tower is quite striking with protruding, vertical sections of the façade providing a modern gloss and flair.

The base is clad in brick, in a rigid pattern of orange, dark-red, and charcoal interrupted by horizontal bands of glossy black brick. At the upper levels of the base, the banding ends and the colored bricks adopt a more random pattern. The ground floor is clad in grey granite, metal, and glass. The main residential entrances are on 67th Street, near the center, with a set of metal service doors between them, and another set to the west. Both entrances have a revolving door to the left of a traditional glass door, set under a canopy. The west entrance is framed entirely in stainless-steel, and the east one in bronze. There is a window on both sides of the east entry, and one to the west of the west entry. The far east end has two plate-glass display-windows, and the west side has a set of metal-and-glass retail exit doors next to a display-window, with the far end having a metal-and-glass corner storefront with another set of doors. More storefront spaces with glass doors stretch along the Broadway frontage, with the three bays next to the northernmost bay having entrances to the Loews Theaters cinema in the northwest part of the base. A very large, black, silver, and red metal marquee covers two of these entrance bays. The north facade has various freight and garage doors for the post office facility in the northeast part of the base. The actual post office storefront is at the east end, and continues down the north part of the east facade on Columbus Avenue, with more storefronts to the south. The entire ground floor is capped by a silver metal band.

Above the ground floor, the lower part of the base on the south facade has four floors each capped by a grey metal band on the eastern half. The western end of these bands, near the center of the facade, have large vents, and the bands wrap around partway onto the east facade, where they terminate in another set of vents. Back on the south facade, the 5th floor has a wide band of windows along the center of this section. There are no openings on the west half, just an electronic sign that wraps around the southwest corner. The 6th floor has three large window openings at the east half, trimmed in orange brick at the top and left sides, and in grey metal at the right sides. There are three more similar openings south end of the east facade's 6th floor. The rest of the 6th floor on the south facade has a ribbon band of windows with a thin band of orange brick across the top, continuing around the southwest corner about a third of the way along the west facade. There is a setback above the 6th floor, with a running track encircling the entire base at this level. The tower begins to rise from the middle of the base above the 6th floor, with a 7th-floor section of the base to its west. This section also has a band of windows, topped by a thin, grey metal band, and extends a shorter distance along the west facade, where the 7th floor is slightly set back and curved.

The west facade of the base has a very large, 3-story expanse of glass at the north half. The 6th floor has a large band of windows, slightly recessed and divided into bays by rounded metal columns. Above the setback, and behind the running track, the upper part of the base has a flat, grey metal-paneled wall extending north from the curving brick section that is angling away to the northeast. Back on the south facade, the right half of where the tower begins to rise has a small, 3-story section of grey metal and glass. To its east, the end of the base's top floors has a narrow strip of windows, extending across the east facade.

On the north half of the Columbus Avenue side of the development's base is a very large wall sculpture entitled "Dichroic Light Field" by James Carpenter that is composed of a grid of silver aluminum panels - at the intersections of the panels are very thin blades of laminated glass and anodized aluminum that protrude horizontally about two feet from the façade. The only openings on the north facade of the base are a wide bay of windows at the center near the top, two narrow horizontal vents to its left, a narrow, 5-story, vertical window strip near the west end, and an area of glass-and-metal curtain wall at the west end that also extends farther across the the west at the 5th floor. Above the track setback, this facade also has a small 3-story curtain wall section at the east half of where the brick tower rises from the base.

The east facade of the tower is organized into 10 bays of double-windows, with the south bay wrapping around the corner. At the north end there are two additional, joined bays of tripartite windows where the only brick is in the spandrels between floors; these brick spandrels match the thickness of those on the rest of the facade at the southern of these two bays, but are thinner at the northernmost bay. The most unusual aspect of the design is at the top, where a cantilevered steel and glass cube juts from the southeast corner, spanning the five southern bays, and continuing as projecting balconies at the 6th bay, on alternating floors.

The east half of the tower's south facade has bands of windows between thin brick spandrels, up to where the cube begins at the top floors. The west half projects out farther to the south and has a bay of double-windows and a bay of tripartite windows that wraps around the corner at the east.

The west facade has three bays of double-windows at the south end. To the north are three sections of projecting glass-and-metal curtain wall, each with a tripartite window and double-window divided by a grey metal panel, and each of the three sections separated by a brick section with a bay of double-windows. The projecting sections begin at the 19th floor, below which they instead have brick cladding with two bays of double-windows. The north facade of the tower has bands of windows on the east half, with brick spandrels
that are thinner at the outer edge. The west half projects out, and has two bays of double-windows, the eastern ones wrapping around the corner. Beginning at the 19th floor the west bay is overtaken by the north face of the projecting curtain wall section from the west facade.

The building contains an 8-level, 12-screen movie theater complex including an Imax theater (partially underground), a 117,000-square-foot Equinox health club, a post office, retail space and 305 condominium units. The rest of the ground-floor retail space is occupied by The Gap apparel store, Baby Gap, a Chase Bank branch, and J. Jill women's clothing store.

www.parkmillennium.com/