Norman Foster bulks up

A tall office building in Manhattan. Designed by Foster + Partners for a banking giant. Replacing a signal work of modernist architecture. Completed in 2025.

Set against the tumult of the last quarter-century in New York City, the new JPMorgan Chase headquarters at 270 Park Avenue, which I toured last week with a spry, 90-year-old Norman Foster, is an unlikely work of architecture in at least four ways.

1) After the World Trade Center towers were destroyed in 2001, more than a few pundits proclaimed that the skyscraper was dead—or at least, as a building type, severely wounded.

2) After the financial crisis of 2008, they said much the same about the ambitions of New York’s biggest banks.

3) After one too many over-scaled, overpriced vanity projects by Rem, Zaha, Renzo, Tadao, Jacques and Pierre, Frank, and, yes, Norman, the eulogies for starchitecture, a few carrying my byline, poured in.

4) After the COVID-19 pandemic, the office building as we’d known it seemed headed for a similar fate.

We might add a fifth category. The rise of adaptive reuse as a core element of contemporary architectural practice in recent years means that in some circles—see “A Moratorium on New Construction,” by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, reviewed in Punch List in July—the ground-up building, as opposed to the thoughtful effort to reimagine an existing structure, is often viewed with a sort of automatic skepticism.

But there was Lord Foster, nattily dressed for a sunny fall morning in a tan suit, navy turtleneck, and green scarf, as a pair of Brobdingnagian new works by Gerhard Richter (“Color Chase One” and “Color Chase Two”) gleamed over his shoulder, holding court in the bombastically airy lobby of 270 Park, a project that challenges every article of that conventional wisdom.

It is tall; it was designed for a bank; it carries the unmistakable signature of a celebrity architect, and is being marketed along those lines; it holds desks and conference rooms rather than apartments; and its ground-up construction required the demolition of a much-admired midcentury building, the Union Carbide headquarters from 1960, by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

What a redemption story. The skyscraper is back! The big banks are back! The starchitect—in this case, the nonagenarian starchitect—is back! Return-to-office is the mandate! Adaptive reuse can’t deliver this kind of architectural wow factor!

Perhaps we should pause to consider the audience for this quintuple resurrection. Watching things rise from the dead is not always a religious experience. Sometimes it’s just terrifying.

To be honest, I didn’t feel either of those extreme emotions while walking through the building with Foster and David Arena, JPMorgan Chase’s voluble and charismatic head of global real estate. (Ian Parker, in a long Foster profile published in the New Yorker in January, noted, accurately, that Arena has “an old-fashioned, sunny hustle about him.”) Mostly it struck me that Foster + Partners, a firm with a hugely influential track record in skyscraper design, is testing out a new sensibility, in part by programmatic necessity.

Out is the airy precision, High Tech gone minimal, that has marked some of its best-known output in recent years, from the Apple Campus in Cupertino to the Millau Viaduct in France. In its place at 270 Park is a strikingly muscular approach—if not quite steroidal, then close. 

It is true that the building, where it meets the street, makes a dramatic gesture, thanks to gymnastics dreamed up by Severud Associates and in-house engineers at Foster + Partners, of tucking in its sides to create plazas facing Park Avenue and Madison Avenue. On the Madison frontage, this makes room for a generous outdoor room featuring an artwork by Maya Lin, “A Parallel Nature,” that covers the base of the tower with a craggy rock face unfortunately reminiscent of the retaining walls Caltrans, a decade ago, added to the 405 Freeway as it cuts through the Sepulveda Pass in Los Angeles.

The building’s top-heavy silhouette calls to mind Minoru Yamasaki’s 1977 Rainier Tower in Seattle, which touches down like a pencil balancing on its sharpened tip. But Foster’s ode to that design is far more massive than the original—as Joann Gonchar pointed out in Architectural Record, the new 270 Park is “a football player balanced on toe shoes.”

Indeed, on the whole, the tower is brawny, bulky, and bronzed. It doesn’t rise so much as it looms. Comparing it to older Foster towers, such as the Hearst headquarters a few blocks uptown (2006) or the canonical Hongkong & Shanghai Bank (1985), is like comparing a yearbook photo of a lean high school senior to the beefy middle-aged guy who comes back for the 30^th reunion. Like the tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, who told Joe Rogan earlier this year that the corporate world had been “culturally neutered” and lost its “masculine energy,” and Jeff Bezos, who has muscled up enough to generate whispers of PED use, Foster’s 270 Park is proud to look strapping on the skyline; as Zuckerberg told Rogan, it “celebrates the aggression a bit more.”

With its villain-dark cast and diagonal bracing on the east and west elevations, the building’s closest architectural forebear is not the sort of coolly rationalist tower that Bunshaft and de Blois produced for SOM at mid-century but instead another skyscraper by the same firm: the broad-shouldered John Hancock Center (now known as 875 North Michigan Avenue) in Chicago, from 1968, by SOM’s Bruce Graham, with engineering by Fazlur Khan.

But, even as we can appreciate Parker’s argument, in the very first line of that New Yorker profile, that Foster increasingly “resembles the titans he serves,” let’s not get too carried away with the notion that his firm has made an active point of chasing a Bezos build on Park Avenue. The building’s mass is in fact the direct result of a consequential zoning change in New York City.

The tower, 1,389 feet tall, is the first project to be built under the Midtown East Rezoning Plan, approved in 2017 in an effort to spur the production of new high-end office space in Manhattan and keep companies like JPMorgan from fleeing to the suburbs, as they love, as a means of exerting leverage, to threaten to do. The plan covers the area between Third and Madison avenues, from East 39^th to East 57^th street. It allows developers to build skyscrapers with floor-area ratios, or FARs, as high as 25, which is a remarkably big number—remarkably generous to developers and their bottom lines, and to banks that hope to build new headquarters. By contrast, Los Angeles caps FAR citywide at thirteen.

The rezoning allowed JPMorgan Chase, for a reported fee of $240 million, to acquire nearly 700,000 square feet of air rights from nearby Grand Central Terminal and another 50,000 from St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church (with some of the proceeds funding public-realm improvements in the neighborhood). This enabled it to build a tower holding 2.5 million square feet of space, distributed across sixty floors. The Union Carbide tower it replaced rose 52 stories and held 1.5 million square feet.

Standing on Park Avenue and looking up at the building, you can feel nearly every one of those extra million square feet. They strain mightily against the building’s envelope. And they’ve been added at the expense of the nearly perfect sense of poise and proportion that marked Union Carbide, a supremely elegant design that, as Reinhold Martin has written, “was, in effect, all curtain wall, inside and out.”

Inside, the soaring lobby of the new tower is a sophisticated machine—complete, as the Financial Times reported, with biometric scanner—for sorting bank employees, who have free run of the tower and its dining floor with twenty eateries, including a pub called Morgan’s, from the New York hoi polloi, who do not. It also brings the brawn inside, in the form of massive fan-shaped columns, wrapped in bronze, that mark the corners of the lobby along the Park Avenue side. Some at JPMorgan call these “the catcher’s mitts.”

The plaza on the Madison side of the tower, officially a Privately Owned Public Space, or POPS, was originally planned for the lobby. But JPMorgan won approval to move it outside, essentially evacuating major traces of the public from the interior of the new building. They gave over some of this recovered space to Foster himself, who produced the first public art project of his long career, “Wind Dance,” which takes the form of a giant American flag near the center of the lobby, fluttering endlessly in a manufactured breeze.

Upstairs, the interiors are designed with an expert and lobotomizing ease, and in great contrast to muscular exposed beams on many floors, by Gensler; they are remarkable only for their unusually high ceilings. The trading floors, with row upon row of workstations with four computer monitors each, are designed—surprise!—by SOM.

It’s worth pausing to let that last fact sink in. SOM watched as JPMorgan, with a boost from the the planning department, demolished one of the firm’s great masterworks, part of what used to be a Park Avenue murderer’s row of midcentury towers by Bunshaft and de Blois, alongside Lever House (1952) and the former Pepsi-Cola headquarters (1960). Then it signed on to help design its replacement. In a subsidiary role to Foster + Partners, no less.

I wondered about this decision—and those of Maya Lin and Gerhard Richter!—for about thirty seconds. Then I remembered an astonishing fact I’d encountered a few days before touring the building with Foster. Last year, for the first time in its history, JPMorgan earned an average profit of more than a billion dollars per week.

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