Solow Building (New York City, New York)

 office building, skyscraper

689-foot, 50-story modernist office building completed in 1974. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (Gordon Bunshaft) for developer Sheldon Solow, its most notable feature is the concave vertical slope at the lower floors of its north and south facades, facing 57th and 58th Street. This is similar to another of Bunshaft's creations, the W. R. Grace Building, which is no coincidence, as he had used the initial, rejected façade design for the Solow Building in his design for the Grace Building.

On both the north and south facades, white travertine marble frames a dark-bronze glass curtain wall of eight bays, creating a stark contrast. The slope begins around the lower quarter of the building, accelerating toward the large 2nd-floor stone gutter. At the ground floor the building's supporting columns protrude out from beneath the gutter at the same accelerating angle for the sake of both engineering and aesthetics. The glass infill of the ground floor is set back behind the sloping columns. Spanning the two center bays is the main entrance, with a semi-circular glass projection with glass doors, bisected by the center structural column. On 57th Street, the building is set back a few feet from its building line and it also makes itself felt more intensely at street level by covering its sidewalks with the same travertine marble used on the facades and in the lobbies. Toward the east end, there is a large metal sculpture of a bright red number 9.

Bunshaft camouflaged the building's huge mechanical floor housing heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) equipment at the building's 4th level by making it appear from the outside as two office floors. The building goes through its block to 58th Street where it faces the south side of the Plaza Hotel over which it looms. This side of 9 West 57th Street has a larger plaza, decorated with a glorious, large Picasso sculpture of a mythic bull. There is another semi-circular entrance projecting at the middle, this one with escalators descending down to a lower level where the restaurant 8 1/2 is located. At the west end on 58th Street there is a raised plaza, next to a ramp down to the underground parking garage at the far end.

The east and west facades both have three sets of large, exposed crossed supports, contained within a recessed bay of glass (they actually are placed over the glass curtain wall). The exposed portion of the wind bracing is covered with black duranodic aluminum. The edges of the narrow east and west facades are clad in travertine stone.