General Electric Building

 office building, skyscraper, NRHP - National Register of Historic Places, Neo-Gothic (architecture), interesting place, Art Deco (architecture), 1931_construction

640-foot, 50-story Art-Deco/Neo-Gothic office building completed in 1931. Designed by Cross & Cross for the RCA Victor Company, it was intended to blend with the low Byzantine dome of St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue and shares the same brick color, with terra cotta decorations chosen to coordinate. The crown of the building is an example of Gothic tracery, which is intended to represent electricity and radio waves, and is lit from within at night.

At the time that RCA Victor commissioned the building, it was a subsidiary of General Electric. The company then moved its headquarters to Rockefeller Center, and this building was deeded over to the parent company, becoming known as the General Electric Building. In 1974 General Electric moved its headquarters to Fairfield, Connecticut, and in 1993 gave the building - two-thirds empty - to Columbia University, gaining a $40 million tax deduction. In 2001 Vornado Realty Trust along with Columbia University sold the building to BHM Company for $120,000,000.

The building is an 8-sided tower articulated with piers and recessed spandrels, rising from a base which completely fills the relatively small site. The major material of the building's exterior is brick. In fact, three different colors, orange, buff, and a tawny color similar in shade to the bricks used in the fabric of Saint Bartholomew's Church, are laid in American bond with narrow joints but randomly, to create the illusion of yet an overall fourth color, a rich bronze. Second only to the brick, terra-cotta is used extensively, and there is red marble at the ground floor.

Four large show windows and the building's main entrance are on Lexington Avenue. Along 51st Street are five large show windows, two narrow ones, and the freight entrance. The two narrow show windows flank a pair of the large ones and the four altogether are the width of the tower high above. These show windows are enframed with reeded jambs, repetitive, vertical elements of graduated height carved in low relief of marble, and pediments, each composed of three elements. Rising from a broad, triangular tympanum of angular fluting, through a broad stepped pediment of limestone is a vertical flash and visage, a spirit from the electrical world, niched. The building's piers rise both from between these windows and from above their pediments. The piers are rounded brick at their outer
edges.

The recessed terra-cotta spandrels are not all alike, however the majority carry an identical pattern. A large chevron dominates the spandrel's upper region; it is molded as angular fluting. A pair of chevrons, each half the size of the larger upper chevron, of even finer angular fluting, occupies the spandrel's lower region. These determined verticals and diagonals are somewhat relieved by the tracery that trails out from the extreme lower angles in the triangles between the upper chevron and the squared top to the spandrel. Superimposed over this pattern is a single, uncharged, electrical bolt, an attenuated lozenge on end, bearing an aluminized finish.

The building's northeast corner curved above the angle buttress and clock crowning the ground floor, to the 12th floor, then, from the street far below, appears splayed to the top of the tower. Three of the building's spectral guardians are placed one above the other to reassure the eye that it is following the correct path upward, the face with the prow-like headress above the 12th-floor parapet, the stylized face and long double flash on the splay between the 23rd and 25th floors, and the double visage between the 34th and 35th floors. Above the clock face at the corner buttress, two realistically modelled aluminum forearms extend and hands hold a decorative, horizontal lantern shade above the clock. A pier rising up the middle of the curve connects the buttress to the face and prow-like headress on the 12th-floor parapet and the splays above, while it separates the curve's paired windows. The curve's spandrels are a different pattern; rather than the chevron-bolt motif, they carry a pattern of three progressively large diamond shapes with an aluminized finish.

Like the show-windows, the main entrance on the avenue is flanked by piers with the same ignitive decorative program and a pier rises from above the pediment, but the entrance is not as wide as the show-windows and as a consequence this central pier is narrower than the others. At the 15th floor a pair of spectral guardians flank the end of this narrow pier. Then the line of windows becomes the central pier once more, rising up the tower like a trumeau but right up through the arch inscribed at the top of the tower's broad face. It is from this pier, and the three like it on the north, west, and south faces, that the fabulous effigies, with their radiating headresses, emerge. The entrance itself is comprised of three glass-and-stainless-steel doors. The overdoor pedimental ornament
is an elaboration of that over the show-windows.

The central vertical pier on the 51st Street facade, unlike its counterpart on Lexington Avenue, rises interrupted only by a single terra-cotta guardian visage and flash at the first setback buttress massing stretched between the 13th and 16th floors then it continues up three setbacks and on up to the effigy above.

The tower top is a magnificent culmination of the building's relentless articulation upwards. On the tower's four broad faces round arches, springing from the four splays, terminate all the piers but the central ones. These, like rambunctious trumeaux, burst through the arches to support the four monumental electrical deities, allegories of the power of radio. The rays that emanate from their heads are cast-aluminum and designed for neon lighting installation. These deities differ from their lower compatriots, the spectral guardians, only in their size and head-dress. The street level angle buttress with its round-headed setbacks is repeated up here in an enlarged variation of eight buttress copings atop the tower's splay piers, each with a fat pinnacle. The central piers extend up behind the deities and, with the splay extensions, become the terra-cotta pinnacles between which the terra-cotta tracery, an intersecting web of curves and counter-curves, similar to that of the entrance transom, is spun. Alternating with the bristling pier pinnacles and surmounting the tracery web are the familiar hand and flash motifs.

The ground floor is occupied by Schnippers restaurant, and Urban Space restaurant.

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