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New York
Architecture Images- Midtown General Motors Building |
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architect |
Edward Durell Stone Emery Roth & Sons |
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location |
767 Fifth Ave, bet. E58 and E59. |
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date |
1964 - 1968 |
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style |
International Style II |
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construction |
214,3m / 705.0ft, 50 floors white
marble black glass The facade of the 50-storey building is formed by piers of white marble with glass bays between, and the vertically soaring mass with a slightly protruding center rises to the height of 215 m. |
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type |
Office Building |
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images |
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notes |
The site was previously occupied by the Savoy-Plaza Hotel (1927) by McKim, Mead & White |
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"Under their seven-eighths-inch marble veneer those
fifty-story hexagonal piers are actually hollow, bearing concrete
columns carrying service ducts, a functional solution that frees the
building's periphery of columns behind the windows and integrates
services with structure." "Beneath the curious mixture of small-town
department store and styling section décor is the kind of breath-taking
skyscraper shell balanced in space that modern technology makes
possible....Inside the building there is wall-to-wall marble. The
Parthenon has come to General Motors. Pentelic marble by the ton from
the same Greek quarries that supplied the Acropolis lathers the lobby
walls; the rejects are upstairs. It is good to keep thinking of the
Parthenon or one begins to link of luxury lavatories," Ada Louise Huxtable, "Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard, A Primer on Urbicide," (A New York Times Book, Collier Books, 1972) "The history of the site was intriguing. As early as
1870, Boss Tweed had decided that the site was the finest in the city
for a new hotel and for the investment of the loot he had acquired
during his reign as lord of the city treasury; he began excavations for
a building he planned to call the Knickerbocker. Tweed's fall meant that
The Knickerbocker never got built. The plot remained a vacant eyesore
until the twelve-story Hotel Savoy, designed by Ralph S. Townsend, was
built and opened in 1892. The public rooms were embellished with an
array of marbles that must have been absolutely dazzling....Although
referred to as a hotel, the Savoy was actually a luxury apartment house
with more-or-less permanent residents. These included in 1914 Charles H.
Hayden; Roland F. Knoedler, the art dealer; and Mrs. Rhinelander Waldo,
who had just built an extraordinary Renaissance house on the southeast
corner of Madison Avenue and Seventy-second Street but did not live in
it." |
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