 Taller than the WFC, the new tower known as 7 World Trade Center replaced a chunkier building of the same name destroyed on September 11th.  The new tower, by Skidmore Owings and Merrill, is more slender and elegant, and has won AIA design awards.

7 World Trade Center

To Fosun International Ltd. for $725 million.

This 800' high, the first international style skyscraper building was designed by Gordon Bunshaft, of SOM, for client David Rockefeller with the intention of reviving the Financial District in the 1950s. &nbsp;The bank headquarters features a large public plaza, subway entrances, and an open lobby with many works of commissioned public art.

These are a series of construction photos on the subway concourse which show how the building was built, the sculpture installed and the Noguchi plaza installed. They were taken over a period of three years, building in 1961, plaza in 1964 and dubuffet in 1974.

One Chase Manhattan Plaza

Chase Manhattan Bank Building, designed by architect Gordon Bunschaft, features a 5-story glass wall along 5th avenue, unusual for the time period.  It celebrates the theme of transparency in modern banking, setting it apart from the dark, fortress-like bank buildings of the era.  

 Time Warner Center exemplifies above all the concept of a city within a building, versus a building within a city. The mixed-use project encompasses major retail, restaurant, and exercise complexes; television studio production facilities for CNN; the cultural performance venues of Jazz @ Lincoln Center; office space (primarily the corporate headquarters of Time Warner); the Mandarin Oriental Hotel; and residential condominiums. It also resolves site infrastructure, including subway access, services, and parking. 

Time Warner Center

 Located in New York City, the world's first and foremost verticalmetropolis, The Skyscraper Museum celebrates the City's rich architectural heritage and examines the historical forces and individuals that have shaped its successive skylines. The Skyscraper Museum is committed to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. Through exhibitions, publications, educational programs, and its award-winning website, the Museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. In March 2004, The Skyscraper Museum opened a permanent home in a building at the southern tip of Battery Park City. The facility occupies ground-floor space in a mixed-use project that includes the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and a 38-story condominium tower. The Museum owns its space, which has been generously donated by Millennium Partners, the building's developers. The distinguished firm of Skidmore, Owings &amp; Merrill (SOM) is the Museum's architect, with award-winning partner Roger Duffy as lead designer. SOM is providing its services pro bono. Tishman Construction Corporation, which has been building New York since 1898, served as Construction Manager pro bono. 

Battery Park City

Skyscraper Museum

 Carol Willis discusses the history of skyscrapers and introduces you to the Skyscraper Museum. 

Three of the most notable people involved with the project include Gordon Bunshaft, the design Principal at SOM, and Natalie de Blois who assisted him as the Project Designer, and Charles Luckman. Trained as an architect, his first job was drafting for Pepsodent Toothpaste's marketing department. He turned out to be so gifted as sales, that in short order he became the President of Pepsodent landing on the cover of Time Magazine as the 'Boy Wonder of American Business' at the ripe old age of 30. He became the US President of Unilever, decided to move the company from Boston to New York, and secured the block on Park Avenue. The UN had just been completed and he wanted to commission the modern office of the future. He commissioned Skidmore Owings and Merrill; and met with the partners in a hotel room so no one at Unilever would catch whiff of his plans.The design breakthrough was a reading of the zoning code that allowed the building to be a rectangular tower it occupied less than 25% of its site instead of a ziggurat. This was a the first time anyone had done this. Additional amenities included a ground floor Art Gallery, a computer room on the second floor, and the plaza. Due to cost overruns, Luckman was actually fired prior to move in. He called his former Architecture School roommate, William Pereira who invited Luckman to join his small office in Los Angeles. They build a practice in LA before splitting. The renovation begun in 1998 added the Isamu Noguchi sculpture garden which had been planned but never installed.

Lever House

 Barry Bergdoll, Phillip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA speaks on how the interaction between the Seagram Building, Lever House, and Tennis and Racquet Club activates the urban environment at 53rd Street and Park Avenue. 

Lever House considered the 1st modernist skyscraper in New York was commissioned by Charles Luckman who was President (and trained as an architect). &nbsp;Rather than make a wedding cake tower as the 1916 New York Zoning Code required for tall buildings, Gordon Bunshaft's act of genius was to set the the building back and only utilize a quarter of the available site area. &nbsp;Other Innovative features included the curtain wall, lack of retail on the ground floor, plaza art program and other employee amenities. &nbsp;It has been renovated several times (all by SOM).

Completed in 1966, the building is one of LA's first Modern High-rises. Despite it's name, the building is not actually located at 1 Wilshire Boulevard, although, the building dose face where Wilshire Boulevard starts.

One Wilshire

The Union Carbide Building, or 270 Park Avenue, was completed in 1960 and is credited to the office of Skidmore Owings &amp; Merrill with Natalie de Blois, FAIA, as its senior designer. Gordon Bunshaft, SOM NY Partner-in-Charge of Design, approved her designs and the work of the rest of the project`s design team. The building, which now functions as JP Morgan Chase headquarters, employs the curtain-walled corporate high-rise style for which SOM was famous. The exterior design includes a plaza on Park Avenue; a 13-story wing that extends to Madison Avenue, matching the neighboring buildings in height; vertical mullions running the 52-story height of the tower, providing a pin-stripe effect; and SOM`s mid-century signature, the curtain wall fa&ccedil;ade. Inside, the building is supported by isolated structural columns which allow an open office plan. De Blois`s task also required finding solutions to the design issues incurred by planning a 700 foot building to be erected over pre-existing train tracks.Never landmarked, the building was the first victim of New Yorks East Midtown Rezoning as JP Morgan scooped up all the newly available air rights from St Barts and St Patricks and tore the building down. They are in the process of replacing it with an even taller building by Foster + Partners which will clock in at nearly 1400 feet tall and will consolidate all Chase's employees under one roof.

Union Carbide Corporation Headquarters

Beacon Capital Partners acquired 85 Broad Street in 2014. An experiential design-driven corporate lobby renovation was done that would make the property more enticing to media and technology tenants.Through the middle of the lobby runs a curved corridor that replicates the former route of colonial-era Stone Street. incorporated digital media, software-driven lighting, and wayfinding graphics with the building, ESI brightened the dark corridor by installing light bars that function as a custom low-resolution video ceiling displaying subtle lighting patterns. One animation shows sky and clouds, as if the corridor were open to the air like it was when it was a street.In the entryways, seven expansive relief maps of Manhattan cover the walls, putting 85 Broad&rsquo;s unique and historic location into the larger context of the city. Sculptural chandeliers echo the light bars that run down the corridor.At the end of each elevator bay, transparent LCD screens, mounted over the historic relief maps, mix opacity and clarity, alternatively obscuring and revealing the details of the maps underneath. The screens display real-time content such as local weather, traffic and social media trends useful for visitors.The building&rsquo;s two exterior entrances are illuminated with oversize LED arches that announce and draw pedestrians down the path of old Stone Street. The Broad Street arch is dynamic, featuring geometric animations, map imagery and generative text patterns that relate to the custom media inside.A light installation spiraling through the building&rsquo;s exterior arcade features light bars and reflective blades that alternate and twist, adding dynamism to the exterior of the building.

The former headquarters of Goldman Sachs, this 27-story building is known for being a forgettable-looking piece of architecture in lower Manhattan which is how the AIA Guide described it. To Eliot Brown writing in the New Yorker it was &ldquo;one of those bland, squint-windowed, stone-fronted thirty-story monstrosities. The brownish tower isn`t interesting enough to be ugly: You have to know what`s inside before anything gets interesting. Goldman Sachs became the world`s most important firm in a spectacularly dull, purposefully frumpy, desperately anonymous tower. Inside, it smelled like cigarettes in the 1980s and homemade chocolate chip cookies on the 30th floor. Babies cried in the first-floor day-care center; Jon Corzine worked outside in a Town Car parked on the curb after his ousting; and Hank Paulson felt sad when birds flew into the windows."

85 Broad Street

Historian and lawyer James Kaplan explains the Jewish-founded financial group Goldman Sachs's contributions to the US government. The US Secretary of the Treasury for President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush were both former Chairmen of Goldman Sachs.

 The sixth stop on the Great Crash of 1929: Tour of the Financial District is in front of the former Goldman-Sachs building and near Millennium High School. Millennium High School was the first high school built south of Fulton Street in decades, and its presence reflects the neighborhood's evolution from strictly business to more residential. At this stop, the tour guides delve into the question "Why does the market crash always seem to happen in the fall?" 

 Located on 11th Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets, John Jay College of Criminal Justice`s new building provides all the functions of a traditional college campus within the confines of a single city block. The 625,000-square-foot building doubles the size of John Jay`s existing facilities by adding classrooms, laboratories, auditoriums, faculty offices, and student lounges. The new building addresses the College`s need for instructional and social spaces and creates a unified academic presence for the institution. The new building consists of a four-story, 500-foot long podium and 14-story tower. The podium, which provides connections to an existing academic building, Haaren Hall, contains dense social and academic programs and is topped by a 65,000-square-foot landscaped terrace that acts as a campus commons. The tower contains faculty offices, academic quads, a conference center, and instructional laboratories. The scale of the new building is similar to its adjacent buildings along 11th Avenue and provides a strong visual presence for the College from the West Side Highway. 

John Jay College of Criminal Justice

 Mustafa Abadan, Design Partner at SOM talks about the decade long process involved in designing the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. 

This steel tower replaced Ernest Flagg's former Singer Building and City Investing Building.Designed in the International Style and completed in 1973. It is 743 ft (226 m) tall and has 54 floors. At 2.3 million sq ft, each floor offers almost 1 acre of office space, making it one of the largest office buildings in New York by usable interior space. Its facade is black, consisting of a structural steel frame. South of the building is Zuccotti Park, formerly called Liberty Plaza Park. One Liberty Plaza was originally commissioned by U.S. Steel, and also housed the headquarters of Merrill Lynch.As of 2016, it was the 656th tallest building in the world.Liberty Street, which abuts the building, got its freedom-loving name in 1794 after the American Revolution (it was previously called Crown Street).One Liberty Plaza’s rectangular, monolithic steel frame calls to mind the style of the Twin Towers, perhaps not surprising as both developments were built around the same time. Interestingly enough, the architecture firm that designed it, Skidmore, Owings &amp; Merrill, is also responsible for the new One World Trade Center

1 Liberty Plaza

At 1776 ft., SOM's David Childs's design for the tallest building in North America opened.

The skyscraper is being built according to a revised design released in June 2005. The new design retains essential elements of the original plan-- soaring 1,776 feet into the sky, its illuminated mast evoking the Statue of Liberty's torch -- but features a smaller, cubic base set back further from West Street to protect the building against future attacks. Rising from its square base -- which will be constructed of impermeable concrete and steel -- the redesigned Freedom Tower will taper into eight tall isosceles triangles, forming a perfect octagon at its center. An observation deck will be located 1,362 feet above ground and there will be a square glass parapet at 1,368 feet, the heights of the original Twin Towers. From these, an illuminated spire containing a television antenna will rise to a final height of 1,776 feet. Other key elements include; 2.6 million square feet of office space, tenant amenity spaces, world-class restaurants, below-grade retail, and access to the PATH, subway, and World Financial Center. According to the Port Authority schedule, the tower is expected to open in the fourth quarter of 2013.

 SOM / DBox Studio / Silverstein Properties

 SOM / Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

Located at the northwest corner of the WTC site 

1 World Trade Center

                                            
                                            
                                            
                                                David Childs of Skidmore Owings and Merrill talks about his experiences on September 11th and what inspired his design for the Freedom Tower, One World Trade Center.
                                            
                                        

The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Building, situated on Vassar Street in Cambridge, serves as a computational research and learning establishment. Designed by Skidmore, Owings &amp; Merrill (SOM), the edifice, spanning approximately 178,000 square feet across eight levels, features a transparent design that encourages community engagement. It houses spaces that include a 250-seat auditorium, a collection of student areas for project work and tutoring, a café, and diverse seating arrangements for study and social interaction. The building’s exterior is has a shingled-glass façade, providing a visual distinction between the lower and upper sections. The south-facing façade incorporates a double-skin design made of interlocking glass units, forming a deep sealed cavity. This design contributes to a reduction in energy usage by roughly 27 percent.

MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Building

The One World Trade Center observation deck spans floors 100–102, offering New York City’s highest viewing point. Separate entrances serve visitors and tenants, with security screening below ground. The 100th floor hosts the main views, the 101st a food court, and the 102nd an event space, all operated by Legends Hospitality. Plans for a Windows on the World–style restaurant were dropped, but three dining venues operate on the upper floors.

One World Observatory

 General Mills 35-acre Corporate Campus, originally designed by S.O.M. Architects, is a statement of 1950s modernism juxtaposed against a pastoral landscape. For the General Mills site, oslund.and.assoc.`s desire was to create the illusion that the new buildings were floating within the landscape, touching a motionless plane of water. In the process of construction, many pieces of sculpture needed to be relocated. The design created a crisp, clean and organic canvas for the relocated art that was a natural extension of the existing outdoor gallery. Places for employee respite and interaction, as well as large gatherings were a strong desire of the client. In response, two courtyards on two different levels were designed to act as reflections of each other and address the programmatic needs of the site. The manicured turf ground plane of the upper courtyard is edged with planting beds that have been created to save existing trees and as locations for site sculpture. In the center of the courtyard, a linear band of Siberian irises, broken by bands of Bluestone, marches towards the edge of the space - dying into the glass and metal facade of a new two-story link between office buildings. The lower courtyard is a mirror image of the upper courtyard. The lower bluestone terrace acts as an outdoor dining place for employees, as well as a gathering space for larger events. Mirroring the band of Siberian irises is a channel of moving water, which emerges from the lower story of the link as a waterfall. Stainless steel bridges cross over the water feature, mirroring the bands of bluestone above. The tree-lined water feeds into a large pond, where its trajectory is reinforced with underwater fountains creating a strong linear band of bubbles moving into the pond. This new picturesque landscape is a pleasure to view from the executive offices, the pedestrian link, or the dining terrace. 

General Mills HQ

General Mills Corporate Headquarters Campus

The original Waldorf–Astoria was built in two stages, as the Waldorf Hotel and the Astoria Hotel, which accounts for its dual name. That original site was situated on Astor family properties along Fifth Avenue, opened in 1893, and designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh. It was demolished in 1929 to make way for the construction of the Empire State Building. &nbsp;Built on the site of the millionaire mansions of the Astor family, two separate, but connected structures– the 13-story iron-framed Waldorf and the later steel-framed 16-story Astoria–were joined to become the Waldorf-Astoria, the world's largest hotel. Illustrating the cycle of Manhattan's rising land values, the great hotel was demolished in 1929 and replaced by the Empire State Building.<a href="https://culturenow.org/people/the-skyscraper-museum?name=The_Skyscraper_Museum">[1]</a>&nbsp;Particularly after its relocation, the Waldorf Astoria gained international renown for its lavish dinner parties and galas, often at the center of political and business conferences and fundraising schemes involving the rich and famous. Particularly after World War II it played a significant role in world politics and the Cold War, culminating in the controversial World Peace Conference of March 1949 at the hotel, whose Stalinism was widely denounced. Conrad Hilton acquired management rights to the hotel on October 12, 1949, and the Hilton Hotels Corporation finally bought the hotel outright in 1972. It underwent a $150 million renovation by Lee Jablin in the 1980s and early 1990s, and in October 2014 it was announced that the Anbang Insurance Group of China had purchased the Waldorf Astoria New York for US$1.95 billion, making it the most expensive hotel ever sold. Anbang then converted the Waldorf's upper-floor hotel rooms into 375 condominiums, closing the hotel for a three-year renovation on March 1, 2017.

The Waldorf Astoria

 Dream Catcher, Janet Echelman`s monumental sculpture for the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, transforms the open space between two buildings into a dynamic, translucent art installation. A group of suspended forms composed of colored fiber netting create a gently-moving, transparent sculpture nearly the height of the ten-story buildings. Echelman laces the artwork directly into the architecture of the two adjacent buildings and in doing so created forms new to her practice. The artwork`s inspiration stems from dreams and the idea of dreaming hotel guests asleep in the two buildings that cradle and support the sculpture. Her studio`s research into brainwave activity during periods of dreaming provided a data set from which they extrapolated the forms that constitute the artwork. Dreams are not only private experiences, they are also social and cultural ones. Dream Catcher is an apt title not only for how it speaks to the guests of the hotel, but to the larger region and its identity as a global epicenter for entertainment and media &ndash; the place where dreams are invented and pursued. Dream Catcher is constructed with four horizontal structural layers suspended between two hotel towers. Between these structural layers float colorful sculptural elements which combine both tensioned and draped forms. The specificity of the narrative to the site is matched by Dream Catcher`s unique response to the site`s formal parameters. The highly dynamic environment of the Sunset Strip, including the presence of soaring buildings, demands a work of equal rigor and commanding presence. With a height of 90 feet and a width of 70 feet, the sculpture provides a large visual presence, tempered by its translucency. The chromatic drama of Dream Catcher, particularly at night with its LED lighting design, offers a vibrant, illuminated visual field prominent both from Sunset Boulevard and locations south of the site. The four-tiered sculptural support system is composed of cables that are integrated seamlessly into the building floor plates and represent a highly collaborative, unified relationship between the artist and the architectural team. Courtesy of Studio Echelman. 

Dream Catcher

 Echelman`s newest work, Earthtime 1.26 Hong Kong premiered in March, 2019 at The Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong and explores the interconnected networks of our cultural and physical world. &ldquo;It's a perfect site for this unexpected intervention. I love jarring juxtapositions -- they wake us up. I imagined a sculpture dropping from the sky to Hong Kong`s iconic Peninsula Hotel,&ldquo; Echelman says. The number 1.26 within the title refers to time, as it measures how a day was shortened by that number of microseconds when a single physical event shifted the earth`s mass. We think of a day as a fixed quantity, but the speed of earth`s rotation is constantly shifting in response to physical phenomena. Echelman started the Earthtime series in 2010 when the Biennial of the Americas asked her to create a work about the interconnectedness of nations. Lightweight and flexible, the sculpture is designed to travel to cities around the world as a physical manifestation of interconnectedness. "I always push beyond the confines of the &lsquo;high art` setting into the public realm to create art that is as accessible and free as the air we breathe.&rdquo; Our surroundings affect how we feel and how we experience our lives - we are responsible for the way our cities look and function. Echelman`s netted works bring softness to the scale of the city. They are soft counterpoints to the hard edges of buildings, offering proof that we can interrogate the status quo - that the assumption that cities must be formed from hard materials and straight edges can be changed. &ldquo;I feel a need to find moments of contemplation in the midst of daily city life,&rdquo; Echelman said. &ldquo;If my art can create an opportunity to contemplate the larger cycles of time and remind us to listen to our inner selves, I believe this can be the start of transformation.&rdquo; The installation marks the launch of The Peninsula Hotel`s multi-year global campaign titled &lsquo;Art in Resonance.` As an official partner of Art Basel, The Peninsula Hotel &ldquo;promises to provide inspiring new experiences for visitors, while helping to shine a spotlight on the culturally-rich city of Hong Kong, The Peninsula`s home.&rdquo; For opening night, The Peninsula constructed public viewing platforms with lounge chairs to invite everyone to recline and look up and notice the choreography of wind coming off Victoria Harbor affecting the sculpture`s soft surface. Echelman`s work, and The Peninsula Hotel`s art program overall, offer an oasis from the chaos of daily city life. Echelman feels that the installation &ldquo;creates a moment of calm sensory experience which heightens our awareness of the subtle changes happening around us.&rdquo; Courtesy of Studio Echelman. 

The Peninsula Hong Kong

1.26 Hong Kong

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS "The more things change, the more they remain the same, as the French say. Here we see two Rowes Wharfs, the first in about 1960, the second in 1988. The resemblances are striking. Both buildings are flat, low walls along Atlantic Avenue, with a grid of windows set in brick above whitish shop fronts at the sidewalk. And both have a prominent archway at the center. The older building was torn down by the Boston Redevelopment Authority soon after the old photograph was made. Its castellated Gothic architecture probably dates from the late 19th century. Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in Chicago, the designer of the new Rowes Wharf, says he didn`t know about the older one when he began his own design. Among the stores in the old Rowes Wharf are Warren Drug, Atlantic Uniform, Hub Surplus, Continental Motor, Billy Vigor`s Surplus, and Marine Hardware. The name &lsquo;Rowes Wharf` is carved into the center of the arch. Vigor`s still exists, on Summer Street, and Mark Vigor remembers the old building. &lsquo;We had the ocean behind and the Central Artery in front,` he recalls. &lsquo;On hot days we`d open the window in the back and get the sea breeze.` He says the store was forced to move out in 1960 or &lsquo;61. The two Rowes Wharfs tell us a short story of changing ideas about urban design in Boston. Both are street buildings. Like the houses of Commonwealth Avenue, they line up in a row with other buildings, making a firm wall that shapes and contains the space of the street just as an interior wall shapes a room. If the new Rowes Wharf had been built in the 1960s or &lsquo;70s, it would surely not have been a street-shaping building but, rather, some kind of free-standing object in a plaza, like the Waterfront Marriott or Harbor Towers. In a sense, we`ve come full circle from Rowes I to Rowes II. We`ve decided once again that a city`s most important outdoor rooms are its streets. Each Rowes, old and new, is a handsomely paneled wall &ndash; with a bold, arched ceremonial door &ndash; for the room that is Atlantic Avenue." -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Rowes Wharf: Arch-itecture," Boston Globe, 23 October 1988

Rowes Wharf

 Keith Morgan, Professor of History of Architecture, compares I. M. Pei's Harbor Towers and Rowes Wharf. 

 Keith Morgan, Professor of History of Architecture, discusses Rowes Wharf's arch and how it plays with the Boston waterfront. 

 Keith Morgan, Professor of History of Architecture, discusses the Rowes Wharf complex, which dates from the early 1980s, from Skidmore, Owens, and Merrill. 

388 Greenwich Street, originally called the Shearson Lehman Plaza and more recently the Travelers Building, is an office skyscraper at 388 Greenwich Street, with frontages on North Moore and West Streets, in the Tribeca neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. 388 Greenwich Street forms a complex with the neighboring 10-story 390 Greenwich Street near the Hudson River. Currently, the two buildings comprise the global headquarters of financial services corporation Citigroup. 388 Greenwich stands about ten blocks north of the World Trade Center site and is among TriBeCa's tallest. Like many other office buildings in Manhattan, 388 Greenwich Street contains a fitness center, full-service dining facilities, a medical center, a conference center, a day care center, and an outdoor park. The building is one of the few in New York with double-deck elevators. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the building's courtyard was used as a triage center.

388 Greenwich Street

Moynihan Train Hall Station and Farley Post Office on 32nd Street and 8th Avenue in New York City 01/03/2021 NYC Architecture Art building exterior steps stairs stair column columns facade exterior January light early day front door area near 34th street mail railroad station rail road Moynihan station train trains US United States Postal Service built in 1912 Architect McKim Mead and White Architectural style Beaux-Arts architects James A Main Branch Postal Service.

Moynihan Train Hall

692 timepieces are suspended above the computer hub at John College of Criminal Justice. Varied in size, style and vintage, these clocks and hourglasses form an implied horizontal cone within the upper space, visible as a colorful abstract composition from within the lab and from the street outside.

When observed from a precise location at the building’s entrance this three-dimensional array creates a perceptual phenomenon known as an anamorphosis. From this perspective the timepieces optically coalesce into a depiction of the scales of justice.

Jurisprudence is complex, challenging and ever evolving. Time itself can seem both constant and elastic, especially when it concerns our legal system. Arbor is an expression of the interplay between the temporal and the judicial, grounded in an individual’s experience of time and space.

John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY

Arbor

 Janet Echelman's Earthtime sculpture series heightens our awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and our physical planet. Earthtime 1.26 Jeddah is installed on the new Art Promenade along the Jeddah waterfront Corniche through April 2022 and is part of a new ambitious creative project by the cultural producer and art collector Swizz Beatz. The sculpture serves as a symbol of interconnectedness, composed of countless intertwined fibers. Each time a single knot moves in the wind, the location of every other knot in the sculpture`s surface is changed in an ever unfolding dance of human-made creation with the forces of nature beyond our control. To create the sculptural form, Echelman works with teams both inside and outside her studio. These include architects, designers, and model-makers in the studio, as well as an external team of aeronautical and structural engineers, computer scientists, lighting designers, landscape architects, and a fabrication team. Inside Echelman`s studio, the physical form of Earthtime 1.26 Jeddah was digitally modeled with inspiration from a scientific data set describing a single geological occurrence -- an earthquake and tsunami in Chile in 2010 -- which caused ripple effects around the globe and even sped up the earth's daily rotation. The number in the title refers to a measurement of time, as the earth`s day was shortened by 1.26 microseconds. Sculpture fabrication begins with braiding custom engineered fibers which are fifteen times stronger than steel by weight. These custom-colored twines are knotted both by loom and by hand, and every rope is spliced using centuries-old craft techniques. Connecting the past with the present, the artwork takes ancient methods to a new urban scale. Courtesy of Studio Echelman. 

Jeddah Corniche / Waterfront

1.26 Jeddah

 Between August 11th and October 3rd, 2021, Janet Echeman`s Earthtime 1.26 sculpture was exhibited at Munich`s Odeonsplatz, presented by Mercedes-Benz. The Earthtime sculpture series seeks to heighten our awareness about the way we are all interconnected with one another and our planet. These sculptures serve as symbols of interconnectedness - composed of countless intertwined fibers. Each time a single knot moves in the wind, the location of every other knot in the sculpture`s surface is changed in an ever unfolding dance of human-made creation with the forces of nature beyond our control. To create the sculptural form, Echelman works with teams both inside and outside her studio. These include architects, designers, and model-makers in the studio, as well as an external team of aeronautical and structural engineers, computer scientists, lighting designers, landscape architects, and a fabrication team. Inside Echelman`s studio, the physical form of Earthtime 1.26 was digitally modeled with inspiration from a scientific data set describing a single geological occurrence in one part of the world (a 2010 earthquake in Chile) that caused ripple effects around the globe, which sped up the earth's daily rotation. The number in the title refers to a measurement of time, as the earth`s day was shortened by 1.26 microseconds. Courtesy of Studio Echelman. 

Odeonsplatz

1.26 Munich

Goldman Sachs opened its new headquarters, designed by Harry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed &amp; Partners. &nbsp;It was the final building to complete Battery Park City.

The building has 2.1 million square feet of space by Harry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed, in association with Adamson Associates International for Goldman Sachs. The gently curved building is 43 stories tall, measuring 740 feet above the sidewalks of the World Financial Center. Among other environmentally noteworthy features are its under-floor air distribution system. Some 11,000 people will be working in the building when fully occupied. There is a freestanding 350-seat oval auditorium on the ground floor.

200 West Street (Goldman Sachs Headquarters)

Deerfield Academy

52nd to 53rd St - between Madison and Park Avenues

Between E. 30th St. and E. 41st St., and 1st Ave. and FDR Dr.

W. 49th to W. 50th Sts., 8th to 9th Aves.

Pepsi Cola World Headquarters

Logan International Airport

Dallas Convention Center

An architectural, urban planning and engineering firm, founded in Chicago by Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings. In 1939, they were joined by engineer John Merrill.&nbsp;The firm's notable current work includes the new headquarters for The Walt Disney Company, Moynihan Train Hall and the expanded Penn Station complex,&nbsp;SOM has also designed some of the world's tallest buildings: John Hancock Center (1969, second tallest in the world when built), Willis Tower (1973, tallest in the world for over twenty years), One World Trade Center (2014, currently the seventh tallest in the world), and Burj Khalifa (2010, currently the world's tallest building).

Designed by SOM and Field Operations, the High Line - Moynihan Connector takes the form of an elevated, 600-foot linear park that creates an episodic urban journey from the contemporary spaces of Midtown West to the verdant gardens and historic structure of the High Line. The Connector is composed of two bridges, the Timber Bridge and the Woodland Bridge, which have distinct identities that expand the High Line’s rich tapestry of experiences.

This 60-story International Style skyscraper, the first of its kind in Lower Manhattan, stood in sharp contrast to its nineteenth century neighbors and served as a high point of urban transformation during the 1960’s. Seventy percent of the nearly 2.5 acre site consists of a plaza that provides much-needed public space for that part of the city.

 The diagonal patterned structural concrete truss tube structure won the Concrete Industry Board Annual Award in 1983.

The unique design of this 49-story black and white tower, completed in 1973 for the Solow Development Corporation, covers 70% of the site at street level and slopes back 40% above the 19th floor to fit neatly into New York's strict zoning envelope.

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts houses one of the worlds most extensive combination of circulating, reference, and rare archival collections in its field. These materials are available free of charge, along with a wide range of special programs, including exhibitions, seminars, and performances. An essential resource for everyone with an interest in the arts--whether professional or amateur--the Library is known particularly for its prodigious collections of non-book materials such as historic recordings, videotapes, autograph manuscripts, correspondence, sheet music, stage designs, press clippings, programs, posters and photographs.

SOM designed this modernist classic to be the world headquarters for the Pepsi-Cola Company. Completed in 1960, the pristine aluminum and glass structure contains approximately 142,500 gross sf of office space organized around a central core. The overall building plan is flexible and accommodates several clearly defined functions efficiently, both spatially and structurally.

The building has housed the New York State Supreme Court since the 1870's.  There was a fire in 1904 which required a major reconstruction.  SOM added a parking garage behind the building in 1990.

In developing this science building for a leading private boarding school, educational opportunity was maximized by co-locating three academic disciplines: science, mathematics, and technology.

The building takes advantage of grade changes between the higher and the lower campus levels. Architecture is extended into the landscape and building walls become site retaining walls. Program spaces are filled in between the walls, stepping down towards their ends and forming a terraced green landscape with garden roofs throughout.

When Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company opened a branch location in 1954 at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street in Manhattan, it ushered in a bold new era of bank architecture. While other financial institutions had started to peel back the industry’s heavy masonry walls, the design by SOM dematerialized them. Its transparent façades, vast luminous ceilings, and street-level vault opened up a long cloistered world.

From 2010 to 2012, SOM renovated 510 Fifth Avenue to adapt the building for retail use. Drawing on archival research and guided by the original design intentions, SOM identified and preserved or restored primary design elements, establishing an architectural integrity that can accommodate changing tenancies while incorporating new requirements of the adaptive reuse. These include the building’s pavilion-like proportions, transparency of
the façade, luminous ceilings, vault door, Bertoia-designed screen and mobile, cantilevered floors, and marble columns. The building was designated a
New York City exterior landmark in 1997 and an interior landmark in 2011.

This building is the second tallest building in Oregon. The building has no right angles because of the unique shape of the lot it was built upon. It earned its nickname for the granite and glass structure that often makes the building appear pink. 

As part of the Presbyterian Hospital modernization and consolidation program, SOM provided campus master planning and design services for two new hospitals and renovations of existing buildings. Working with SOM, the hospital initiated a long-range modernization plan in 1981 to consolidate the facility and respond to the demands of the future. This project won the 1990 Modern Healthcare Award for hospital design. The goal of the modernization program was to confront the obsolescence of the campus and the fractionalization of medical center functions over time. A new configuration of facilities was developed which would be more cost-effective and would accommodate state-of-the-art clinical, educational, and research activities. 

Proposed site of seven residential, commercial, and retail towers. Controversy: some of the towers will be taller than the UN's Secretariat Building. May be completed in 2015.

Replacing the second Madison Square Garden, these boxy apartment and office towers echo Rockefeller Center in design but lack something of its elegance and appeal.

35 Hudson Yards is located at the southeast corner of 33rd Street and 11th Avenue. The 1.1-million-square-foot mixed-use tower, designed by David Childs and Skidmore Owings & Merrill, will feature approximately 137 exclusive for-sale residences, an over 200-room Equinox® branded luxury hotel, a world-class 60,000 square foot Equinox® fitness club and spa, first class office space and ground floor retail space. Standing 1,000 feet tall, 35 Hudson Yards will be the tallest residential building at Hudson Yards, offering never-before-seen views from Manhattan’s West Side.

Residents living at 35 Hudson Yards will benefit from hotel-style amenities with superior services and on-site concierge staff. Residents will also be surrounded by parks with direct access to the High Line and Hudson Park & Boulevard; exciting shopping, dining, nightlife and cultural events in Hudson Yards; and the variety of entertainment options in the surrounding Chelsea and Midtown neighborhoods.

At 1776 ft., SOM's David Childs's design for the tallest building in North America opened,&nbsp;

Al Hamra Tower in Kuwait City is distinctive for its performance driven form, innovative engineering strategies and thoughtful response to climate conditions. At 412.6 meters (1,354 feet) tall, the 80-story office building is the tallest structure in Kuwait and the tallest building in the world to have a continuous stone façade.

Al Hamra Tower’s asymmetrical geometry is generated by a simple operation of removal. Informed by solar analyses, the architect removed one quarter of the floorplate from the south façade, initiating at the southwest corner of the tower and rotating counter-clockwise over its height. Al Hamra’s sculptural form is essentially a passive solar protection strategy: its southern limestone-clad facade offers a sheild against solar heat gain and acts as a
heat-storing thermal mass. The east, north and west facades are clad in glass, permitting 270º views of the water.

The "new" Columbus City Hall was designed by Edward Charles Bassett of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). Completed in 1981, it replaced the 1895 City Hall designed by Charles F. Sparrell. The diagonal front of this right triangular building bisects its full block site and creates a strong visual relationship with Washington Street, Second Street, and the neighboring Bartholomew County Courthouse. Two brick-clad cantilevered beams create a distinctive entry to a semi-circular forecourt bordered with a window wall of glass. Several works of public art are displayed on the ground floor. The architect's fees were paid for by the Cummins Foundation Architecture Program. City Hall is located within the Columbus Arts District.

The Republic was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) with Myron Goldsmith as design partner, Jin Kim as senior designer, and George Larson as interior designer. When completed in 1971, the simple glass and steel building allowed passersby to see the large, bright yellow offset press at work printing the newspaper. The press was removed in 1998, and Todd Williams renovated the area to provide additional office space and a meeting room. The building maintains its open plan allowing the public to observe how the newspaper works to delivery information to the community. The Republic received a design award from the American Iron and Steel Institute in 1973 and an American Institute of Architects (AIA) Honor Award in 1975. The building is located within the Columbus Arts District and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2012 (NHRP 12001015).

The Trammell Crow Center totals 1.2 million square feet of space on 50 floors. The postmodern skyscraper, completed in 1984, has a façade of polished and flamed granite. Surrounding the building is a publicly accessible sculpture garden featuring 22 bronze sculptures by Maillol, Rodin, Wlerick, Buxin, and

Bourdelle. The earliest work dates to 1889. In 1998, the Flora Street side of the building was remodeled to accommodate the Trammell and Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art. The Crow Collection is dedicated to the art of China, Japan, India, and Southeast Asia. The collection includes over 600 paintings, objects of metal and stone, as well as large architectural pieces. Admission to the museum is free. 

The University Center is the new hub of the New School campus: a 16-story, approximately 375,000-square-foot building located at the intersection of 14th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The building has 230,000 square feet of academic space on the first seven floors and 135,000 square feet for a 600-bed dormitory on the remaining nine floors, providing space for all aspects of campus life. There is an additional 10,000 gross square feet of retail space on the first floor and below street level along 14th Street.

The academic space includes 50,000 square feet of design studios, interdisciplinary classrooms, and laboratories that are easily adaptable to encourage a mix of different disciplines. It will include an 800-seat auditorium, featuring a reconfigurable stage (with 18 electric lifts) that can be set up for dance and musical performances or as a fashion runway; a large cafeteria; a two-story library; a 2,200-square-foot faculty resource center; three student lounges; and a lobby and café on two levels, suitable for performances.

The building includes numerous spaces for informal interaction such as the three central staircases that weave their way through the building. The University Center is a hive of activity, visible from the street through large glass windows.

Installed by Time Warner as part of its headquarters and set in a 150-foot prow-like glass showcase, this sculpture is divided vertically into 12 groups of 36 lighting panels, illuminated each evening from 4 to 11 pm, showing off a range of patterns. The panels change color for three minutes, then hold their color for 30 seconds. The display pauses every quarter hour to tell the time using large panels to indicate the hour and smaller panels for five-minute increments.

High Line - Moynihan Connector

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 Historian and lawyer James Kaplan explains the Jewish-founded financial group Goldman Sachs's contributions to the US government. The US Secretary of the Treasury for President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush were both former Chairmen of Goldman Sachs. 

Catherine Cuellar discusses the Postmodern architecture of the Trammell Crow Center.

Lia Gartner, VP for Design and Construction at the New School, and Roger Duffy from SOM, and Architect for the University Center at the New School discuss the University Center at the New School. Because the building hosts a range of academic departments, from design to performance, and it sits on prime real estate in New York, every inch needs to function in many ways. The space is a campus that serves many functions on a tight urban site.

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