Deutsche Bank Center
Deutsche Bank Center is a mixed-use building on Columbus Circle in Manhattan, New York City, United States. The building occupies the western side of Columbus Circle and straddles the border between Hell's Kitchen and the Upper West Side. It was developed by The Related Companies and Apollo Global Management, and designed by David Childs and Mustafa Kemal Abadan of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
Deutsche Bank Center features twin towers, connected by a multi-story atrium. They are the tallest twin buildings in the United States. The building has a total floor area of. It contains office space, residential condominiums, the Mandarin Oriental, New York hotel, and the Jazz at Lincoln Center entertainment venue. The Shops at Columbus Circle shopping mall is placed at the base of the building, with a large Whole Foods Market grocery store on the lower level.
The building was built on the site of the New York Coliseum, formerly New York City's main convention center. Plans for the project, then known as Columbus Center, were approved in 1998. Construction began in November 2000 and a topping-out ceremony was held in 2003; the project was known as AOL Time Warner Center during construction, but the "AOL" name was dropped before opening. Time Warner Center officially opened on February 5, 2004. Deutsche Bank replaced WarnerMedia as the anchor tenant of the office area in May 2021 and it was renamed Deutsche Bank Center.
Site
The center is on the west side of Columbus Circle, on the border of Hell's Kitchen and the Upper West Side, in Manhattan, New York City, United States. It occupies an irregular plot of land bounded by 60th Street to the north, the Coliseum Park apartment complex to the west, and 58th Street to the south. The eastern boundary consists of Eighth Avenue, Columbus Circle, and Broadway from south to north. The land lot covers, with a frontage of on Columbus Circle and a depth of. Deutsche Bank Center's primary address is 1 Columbus Circle. The building also uses the addresses 25 Columbus Circle for its south tower and 80 Columbus Circle for the north tower.The building is near Trump International Hotel and Tower to the northeast, Central Park to the east, 2 Columbus Circle and 240 Central Park South to the southeast, and Central Park Place to the south. Entrances to the New York City Subway's 59th Street–Columbus Circle station, served by the, are directly outside the building. As part of the construction of what was then Time Warner Center, the existing subway staircase was refurbished and an elevator was added to the subway entrance. Because the building did not include a zoning bonus, the developers did not need to fund a renovation of the subway station, as Hearst Communications was obligated to do when it built Hearst Tower one block south.
Deutsche Bank Center occupies the site of the New York Coliseum, which itself replaced two city blocks bounded by Columbus Circle, 60th Street, Ninth Avenue, and 58th Street. The Coliseum opened in 1956 as New York City's main convention center, being superseded by the Javits Center in the 1980s. Around the same time, the area around Columbus Circle was being redeveloped, in part because of the Coliseum's success. This prompted the Coliseum's owner, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, to place the building up for sale in 1985. An agreement on the site's redevelopment was not finalized until 1998, and designs for the Coliseum replacement itself were not in place until 1999. This was in part due to disagreements over the site, as well as a weak economy in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Architecture
Deutsche Bank Center was designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, working with T. J. Gottesdiener and Mustafa K. Abadan of the same firm. Specific portions of the interior were designed by different architects. AOL Time Warner, Apollo Global Management, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Palladium Company, and the Related Companies were the developers. Stephen M. Ross, CEO of the Related Companies, said that SOM had been selected since they "create great architecture but also speak the language of business". Bovis Lend Lease was the construction manager for much of the interior, including mechanical systems. Another 80 to 100 subcontractors were also hired for different parts of construction.Deutsche Bank Center includes towers to the north and south, joined at the base. The building is split into eight different ownership units: the basement parking garage, the Shops at Columbus Circle mall, Jazz at Lincoln Center's facilities, the original AOL Time Warner office space, the six other office stories, the condominium units in the north and south towers, and the Mandarin Oriental New York hotel. The building has about of interior space in total. About of mechanical and underground space is not counted under zoning law. This gives a gross floor area of, which is close to the maximum area allowed under a floor area ratio of 15. Deutsche Bank Center uses a total of of glass, as well as of steel and of concrete.
Form and facade
The base of Deutsche Bank Center measures wide, as measured from north to south, by deep. The building is designed to face Central Park, with a general trapezoidal shape. Two towers with a parallelogram-shaped massing rise from the base. The towers are aligned with Broadway, which runs diagonally relative to the Manhattan street grid, while the base is aligned with the street grid. The space between the towers is on axis with 59th Street and Central Park South. The western and eastern facades of both towers are aligned 30 degrees counterclockwise from the axis of Eighth Avenue and Central Park West. Both towers are 55 stories tall with a roof height of. The pinnacle of each tower consists of a lantern measuring tall.The base of Deutsche Bank Center contains a limestone facade with large window openings, which taper off into glass bands. The facade of the upper stories is clad with glass. There are small, projecting glass fins every, which, from an angle, give the facade the appearance of a myriad of small shards. The glass panes were initially specified to be thick, but the architects changed the specification during construction to to stiffen the panes. The architects had originally intended for the glass to be light gray, but a darker shade was later specified. Atop the towers are glass parapets that absorb natural lights.
A multistory cable structure, facing 59th Street across Columbus Circle, serves as the entrance to an atrium between the building's twin towers. The structure consists of a grid of stainless-steel cables apart vertically and apart horizontally. Laminated-glass panels measuring thick are placed within the cables. Measuring across and high, the cable structure was the largest in North America at the time of its completion. It was designed by James Carpenter Design Associates. According to Carpenter, the cable grid was intended "to be as delicate, transparent and diaphanous as possible" to allow simultaneous views into and out of the atrium. Abby Bussel, author of a book about SOM, wrote that the main entrance was intended to "project a civic face to the community" at night.
The southeast corner of the building, at Eighth Avenue and 58th Street, contains a triangular wedge-shaped glass structure measuring about tall. For the first months of the complex's existence, the glass structure was empty. As part of an agreement with the New York City government, the structure could not include advertising. Prow Sculpture, an art installation by David Rome, was then installed in the structure by 2004. This consists of 12 sets of 36 translucent panels, each supported by vertical trusses. The panels each contain light-emitting diodes that change color once every few minutes. The panels also change color to display the time at 15-minute intervals. The lights can be illuminated in different colors to mark special occasions. The artwork requires 200 tons of air conditioning, as well as frequent cleaning.
Lower stories
The base of the building contains a steel superstructure with the Shops at Columbus Circle, Jazz at Lincoln Center, broadcast studios, and originally AOL Time Warner's headquarters. The towers' concrete superstructures rest above the base. Structurally, the building's base also includes the steel-framed lower sections of both towers. The steel frame extends high below the north tower and high below the south tower. The steel superstructure allowed the architects to use several column arrangements to accommodate the differing needs of each tenant, and it allowed the architects to create large, column-free spaces for hotel ballrooms, broadcast studios, and offices. Twenty-four entrances were originally provided at the base. To avoid interfering with the entrances and other open spaces, the building uses diagonal steel columns; concrete columns with stepped notches; and columns hanging from trusses.The property's foundation is surrounded by a concrete cofferdam measuring deep and across. The building plans were technically an "alteration" to the New York Coliseum, since the building incorporates the Coliseum's underground parking garage. The parking garage, originally leased to the Central Parking Corporation, has 504 spots. The garage spans three stories and has sensors to monitor how many vehicles are parked in the garage. The garage also has a valet parking service. At ground level, the lobby for the south tower's residences is on 58th Street while the north tower's hotel and condominium lobby is on 59th Street. In addition, there are office lobbies on both 58th and 59th Streets; that on 58th Street originally served the Time Warner lobby.
Mall
Deutsche Bank Center has a four-story retail mall, the Shops at Columbus Circle, which opened in 2004 along with the rest of the complex. Designed by Elkus Manfredi Architects, it was known during planning as the Palladium. The mall's ground-floor tenants include designer shops and restaurants. Among the first retail tenants in the mall were a Whole Foods Market, as well as an Equinox gym, both in the basement. The third and fourth stories contain the Restaurant Collection, with two Michelin 3-star restaurants as of 2023, as well as other eateries such as Porter House New York and Bad Roman.The mall is designed to follow the curve of Columbus Circle, measuring long. It contains an atrium high, leading west from Columbus Circle. This atrium, known as the "Great Room", is about wide and long with. A passageway, extending north and south from the atrium, covers.