Hearst Tower (Manhattan)
The Hearst Tower is a skyscraper at the southwest corner of 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, near Columbus Circle, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, United States. It is the world headquarters of media conglomerate Hearst Communications, housing many of the firm's publications and communications companies. The Hearst Tower consists of two sections, with a total height of and 46 stories. The six lowest stories form the Hearst Magazine Building, designed by Joseph Urban and George B. Post & Sons, which was completed in 1928. Above it is the Hearst Tower addition, designed by Norman Foster and finished in 2006.
The building's main entrance is on Eighth Avenue. The original structure is clad with stone and contains six pylons with sculptural groups. The tower section above has a glass-and-metal facade arranged as a diagrid, or diagonal grid, which doubles as its structural system. The original office space in the Hearst Magazine Building was replaced with an atrium during the Hearst Tower's construction. The tower is certified as a green building as part of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.
The Hearst Magazine Building's developer William Randolph Hearst acquired the site for a theater in the mid-1920s, in the belief that the area would become the city's next large entertainment district, but changed his plans to construct a magazine headquarters there. The original building was developed as the base for a larger tower, which was postponed because of the Great Depression. A subsequent expansion proposal during the 1940s also failed. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the facade of the original building as a city landmark in 1988. After Hearst Communications considered expanding the structure again during the 1980s, the tower stories were built in the first decade of the 21st century.
Site
The Hearst Tower is on the border of the Hell's Kitchen and Midtown Manhattan neighborhoods of New York City, United States. Located two blocks south of Columbus Circle, it is bounded by 56th Street on the south, Eighth Avenue on the east, and 57th Street on the north. The building faces Central Park Place on the north, 3 Columbus Circle on the northeast, and Random House Tower on the east. It is one block south of Deutsche Bank Center and 2 Columbus Circle. The base of the Hearst Tower has three street addresses: 951–969 Eighth Avenue, 301–313 West 56th Street, and 302–312 West 57th Street. The site is a nearly-square lot covering and measuring. Entrances to the New York City Subway's 59th Street–Columbus Circle station are at the structure's base.The building is near a former artistic hub around a two-block section of West 57th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. The hub had been developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, after the opening of Carnegie Hall on Seventh Avenue in 1891. The area contained the headquarters of several organizations, such as the American Fine Arts Society, the Lotos Club, and the ASCE Society House. Although the original Hearst Magazine Building was just outside the artistic hub, its proximity to these institutions was a factor in the choice of its location. By the 21st century, the arts hub had largely been replaced with Billionaires' Row, a series of luxury skyscrapers around the southern end of Central Park.
Immediately prior to the construction of the Hearst Magazine Building in the 1920s, the site was referred to as the Hegeman site. Sixteen people had owned the land, which was largely vacant except for an open-air movie theater and some stores.
Architecture
The original six-story structure, known as the Hearst Magazine Building or the International Magazine Building, was designed by the architect Joseph Urban and the architectural firm George B. Post & Sons. Completed in 1928 and intended as the base of a future tower, the Hearst Magazine Building was designed in early Art Deco style. Henry Kreis designed six sculpture groups at the third story. The Hearst Magazine Building is the only survivor of an unbuilt entertainment complex which its developer, Hearst Communications' founder William Randolph Hearst, envisioned for Columbus Circle in the early 20th century. The tower was designed by Norman Foster and completed in 2006, almost eight decades after the base was built. The Hearst Corporation and Tishman Speyer developed the tower; WSP Global was the structural engineer, and Turner Construction was the main contractor. The design of the tower section was influenced by the need to retain the lowest stories, which were protected as a city landmark.The two sections have a combined height of, with 46 stories above ground. Its base occupies nearly the whole lot and originally contained floors, arranged in a "U" shape, flanking a courtyard on the west. The courtyard abuts a residential tower called the Sheffield, which sits directly on the Hearst Magazine Building's western lot line. Along much of the base, the third through sixth stories are slightly set back from the lowest two floors. The original building's roof was above ground. The upper stories are more deeply set back from the lowest six floors on the north, east, and south sides and are directly adjacent to the Sheffield on the west. Each of the upper stories has a footprint of, with the longer dimension extending from east to west. The setbacks above the sixth floor contain a skylight wide.
The Hearst Tower has of office space. According to the New York City Department of City Planning, the building has a gross floor area of. The tower received a zoning bonus which enabled its maximum floor area to be expanded by six floors or, a 20% increase from the previous maximum allowed floor area of. The Hearst Corporation agreed to improve access to the subway station underneath in return, adding three elevators and reconfiguring the station's circulation areas. Without the zoning amendment, the Hearst Corporation might have had to pay up to $10 million for additional air rights, as the company had already used up all the air rights above the Hearst Magazine Building.
Facade
Base
The cast-limestone facade of the Hearst Magazine Building, now the base, is a New York City designated landmark with of surface area. It is divided horizontally into the two lowest stories, three intermediate stories, and a sixth-story attic. The base's northeastern and southeastern corners are chamfered. A balustrade is in front of the third-story windows, supported by a shelf with notches and interrupted by the chamfered corners. A parapet is above the fifth story, except in the bays above the entrance arches on Eighth Avenue and 57th Street and at the chamfered corners. With the construction of the Hearst Tower, the base's facade was retrofitted to meet updated city seismic codes. Because the original office space was replaced with an atrium in the Hearst Tower's construction, the windows on the third through sixth stories of the facade illuminate the atrium. Only the first two stories of the original building retain their original usage.The main entrance, at the center of the Eighth Avenue elevation, contains a large archway flanked by a pair of smaller, rectangular doorways. The archway has gray granite panels at its base and voussoirs and a beveled keystone at its top, overlapping with a balcony. The barrel-vaulted vestibule inside the archway contains embossed octagonal coffers. The far western end of the vestibule has an entrance with a bronze frame and four glass doors beneath a bronze-and-glass transom. There is a subway entrance on the right side of the Eighth Avenue entrance vestibule. On either side of the entrance arch, the Eighth Avenue elevation contains glass and metal storefronts at ground level and seven sash windows on the second story. On 57th Street, a former secondary entrance was altered to create a storefront topped by a window. There is another subway entrance on the left of the original doorway. The remainder of the ground-story facades at 57th and 56th Streets also contain glass and metal storefronts, with loading docks on the far western section of the 56th Street facade.
The base contains six pylons, which are supported by stone pedestals with allegorical sculptural groupings on the third story and topped by sculpted urns above the sixth story. The pylons indicate that the building was originally planned as a theater. The centers of the Eighth Avenue and 57th Street facades are identical, with two pylons each. The left pylon on both entrances contains sculpture groups depicting comedy and tragedy, and the right pylon contains sculptures representing music and art. Similar pylons rise in front of the northeast and southeast corners of the base. The northeast-corner pylon contains a group representing printing and the sciences, and the southeast-corner pylon has a group representing sports and industry.
Between the pairs of pylons on Eighth Avenue and on 57th Street, on each of the third through sixth stories, is a tripartite window with fluted stone spandrels. The Eighth Avenue and 57th Street elevations contain seven bays, on either side of the vertical bay, which are set back above the second story. The third through fifth stories of these elevations have sash windows, slightly recessed behind the main facade, and the sixth-story windows are flush with the cast-stone facade. The setback and window arrangement are carried around to the eight eastern bays on 56th Street. The two westernmost bays on 57th Street and the twelve westernmost bays on 56th Street are not set back above the second story, and do not contain third-story balustrades. The third-through-fifth story bays on the western section of the 56th Street facade are grouped into six pairs, separated by pilasters which were designed to emphasize the upper, never-built stories.
Tower
A clerestory wraps around the seventh through tenth floors atop the base, structurally separating the tower from the base. The tower facade has a triangular framing pattern known as a diagrid above the tenth floor, which is the tower's structural support system. The structural system, similar to the Commerzbank Tower in Frankfurt and 30 St Mary Axe in London, was developed in conjunction with Ysrael Seinuk. It was one of the first large-scale uses of a diagrid.The diagrid divides the tower's sides horizontally into eight tiers, each measuring four stories high. Additional diagonal beams divide the facade into alternating upright and inverted triangles, which intersect at "nodes" along points of the facade. The arrangement of the diagrid creates chamfered "birds' mouths" at the tower's corners at the 14th, 22nd, 30th, and 38th floors; the lower and upper sections of the birds' mouths slope outward from a recessed central section. The New York Times wrote that the beams and "birds' mouths" run at a 75-degree angle to the horizontal floor slabs; another author cites the beams as running at a 65-degree angle.
The triangles in the diagrid are prefabricated panels, which were manufactured by the Cives Steel Company in New York and Virginia. Each of the triangles is tall. The diagonal beams are typically long by wide. The columns are bolted, rather than welded, to each other at the nodes. The diagrid required of structural steel, 20% less than what would have normally been required for a building of similar size. The amount of recycled steel in the diagrid is variously cited as 85% or more than 90%. The exterior curtain wall was constructed by Permasteelisa, which mounted 3,200 glass panels on the facade. The panels are typically tall by wide, although 625 of them were built to custom specifications.
Because of the facade's intricate design, the tower's window cleaning rig took three years and $3 million to plan. It incorporates "a rectangular steel box the size of a Smart car" on the roof, which hoists a mast and a hydraulic boom arm. Sixty-seven sensors and switches are housed in the box. A window-cleaning deck hangs from the hydraulic boom arm, supported by six wire-rope strands. The rig, installed in April 2005 on of elevated steel track circling the tower's roof, snapped in 2013 and trapped two window cleaners.