Hearst Tower – the first LEED Gold office building in NYC – officially opens this evening with a gala celebration presided over by Hearst Corporation President and CEO Victor F. Ganzi, Vice Chairman Frank Bennack, New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Hearst Tower architect Lord Norman Foster. The 46-story glass-and-steel world headquarters tower is located at Eighth Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets, housing 2,000 Hearst employees and some of the world’s best-known print, electronic and interactive brands.
“Hearst Tower is a statement about who we are as a company, the confidence with which we view the future in a changing world of media, and about our place in this great city,” said Ganzi. “We also believe it’s a symbol of our determination to add something inspiring to New York’s skyline and a demonstration of the vast possibilities and benefits of green design.”
In addition to its magazine and corporate offices, Hearst Tower hosts a broadcast studio, a digital photography center, a fitness center (theCLUB) open to employees at subsidized prices, an executive conference and dining center (The 44th Floor), a 340-seat corporate cafe (Cafe57), a 168-seat theater (Joseph Urban Theater), exhibition spaces and a sleek Good Housekeeping Research Institute–housing a wide range of facilities and equipment to test virtually every consumer product in America, as well as the Good Housekeeping Dining Room.
A New Icon for New York City
Unlike a traditionally framed structure, Hearst Tower has a triangulated form. With its corners peeled back, the effect, created by Lord Foster and Foster and Partners, emphasizes the building’s vertical proportions and creates a distinctive faceted silhouette on the skyline that reveals unique views across the Manhattan grid. The tower required 20 percent less steel- 90 percent of which is recycled.
The main spatial event is a vast internal plaza -an ‘urban living room.’ This dramatic space, surrounded by the original windowed masonry walls, creates a bold entrance that echoes the tone and texture of the 1920s exterior to evoke a sense of the civic realm. Providing access to all parts of the building, it is the social heart of the Hearst community, incorporating Cafe57, the Joseph Urban Theater and exhibition spaces.
A series of diagonal escalators set between a cascading fall of chilled water connect the street level to the grand internal plaza, with elevated mezzanine levels used for meetings, exhibitions and special functions. The two-story-high “Icefall”–a collaboration of Foster and Partners with glass specialist Jamie Carpenter and Jim Garland of Fluidity–uses collected rainwater to cool the atrium in summer and humidify it in wintertime.
“Riverlines”–a 40- by 70-foot installation–by artist Richard Long, is a contemplative mural set against the elegant gray stone of the elevator core. Like a cave painting for the 21st century, it is created from the mud of the Avon and Hudson rivers and celebrates the metaphor of the river as a symbol of journey, movement and life.
Contributors to the Hearst project include: Tishman Speyer–owner’s developer; Foster and Partners–design architects; Turner Construction–construction manager; Adamson Associates–associate architects; Gensler–interior architects; WSP Cantor Seinuk– structural engineers; and Flack and Kurtz–mechanical engineers.
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