712 Fifth Avenue is a skyscraper at 56th Street and Fifth Avenue in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Constructed from 1987 to 1990, it was designed by SLCE Architects and Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. The skyscraper's base includes the Coty Building at 714 Fifth Avenue (built 1871) and the Rizzoli Bookstore building at 712 Fifth Avenue (built 1908), both of which are New York City designated landmarks.
The facades of the Coty and Rizzoli buildings are preserved at the base; an imitation facade was also built at 716 Fifth Avenue to complement the grouping. The lower floors contain a storefront and an atrium behind the landmark facades of the Coty and Rizzoli buildings. The tower stories contain a facade of white marble, gray limestone, and green and black granite. Inside the tower, each floor has of office space on average. The newer tower's juxtaposition with the Coty and Rizzoli buildings was both praised and criticized by architectural writers such as Paul Goldberger and Christopher Gray.
Before the construction of the present skyscraper, 712 Fifth Avenue was the address of the Rizzoli Bookstore building. Planning for 712 Fifth Avenue dates to 1983, but the project was delayed for several years because of opposition to the demolition of historic structures at the skyscraper's base. The Coty and Rizzoli buildings were incorporated into the base, where a Henri Bendel store operated from 1990 until 2018. Upon completion, the skyscraper was mostly vacant because of a weak real-estate market. The building was sold in 1999 to the Paramount Group for a then-record $285 million.
Site 712 Fifth Avenue is in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. It faces Fifth Avenue to the east and 56th Street to the north. The land lot is L-shaped and covers , with a frontage of on Fifth Avenue and a depth of . It wraps around another structure at 718 Fifth Avenue, on the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street. The modern skyscraper spans what was formerly 12 separate parcels.
The building is on the same block as the townhouses at 10 and 12 West 56th Street to the west, as well as the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church to the south. Other nearby buildings include the Rockefeller Apartments to the southwest; The Peninsula New York hotel and the University Club of New York to the south; the St. Regis New York hotel and 689 Fifth Avenue to the southeast; the Corning Glass Building and 550 Madison Avenue to the east; Trump Tower, the Tiffany & Co. flagship store, and 590 Madison Avenue to the northeast; and 17 West 56th Street and the Crown Building to the north.
Fifth Avenue between 42nd Street and Central Park South (59th Street) was relatively undeveloped through the late 19th century. The western side of the avenue, between 55th and 56th streets, contained the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church at the 55th Street corner and a series of brownstone houses on the rest of the block. The church built a brownstone with the address 712 Fifth Avenue in 1886. By the early 1900s, that section of Fifth Avenue was becoming a commercial area.
Architecture 712 Fifth Avenue includes a 52-story tower with 11 elevators and rises to a total height of . The tower, constructed in 1989, was designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) along with SLCE Architects. A. Eugene Kohn of KPF was the partner-in-charge, while William Pedersen was the design partner and Chao-Ming Wu was the senior designer. The building is a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design basic silver certified structure. The skyscraper's base includes two preexisting structures: the Rizzoli Building (1907) and the Coty Building (1908). The rest of the base was built with the skyscraper itself.
Facade Rizzoli Building The five-story Rizzoli Building, designed by Albert S. Gottlieb, carried the address of 712 Fifth Avenue before the present skyscraper was built. Designed in the French classical style, the structure is about deep and is five stories tall with a limestone-and-brick facade. The facade is three bays wide, and at ground level, had a door in the rightmost bay. On the upper stories, the Rizzoli Building had a piano nobile with three full-height, arched windows, as well as balusters underneath each opening. There were also Rizzoli inscriptions above the second floor. The third and fourth floors' articulation was designed as a single unit, with each bay separated by pilasters containing Corinthian-style capitals; the windows on these floors are casement windows. The fifth floor is within a black slate mansard roof, recessed behind a stone balustrade.
Coty Building
The six-story Coty Building at 714 Fifth Avenue was redesigned by Woodruff Leeming and is designed as a frame around a glass wall. The first two stories have limestone-faced piers and a cornice. The third through the fifth stories are also treated as one unit, as a wall of glass. The glass windows were designed by René Lalique and comprise the only documented work by that architect in the United States. There are five vertical window bays, separated by thin vertical steel mullions. The top floor is set off by a modillioned cornice with console brackets supporting a balustrade. The sloping metal-covered roof with its arched dormers allowed the building to harmonize with its neighbors.
Skyscraper addition The rest of the skyscraper's base is made of solid masonry clad with rough Indiana limestone and is five stories tall. On Fifth Avenue, a two-bay-wide, five-story neoclassical facade was built north of the Coty Building. It serves as a "bookend" to the Coty facade and is similar to the facade of the Rizzoli Building. The detailing consists of more superficial two-dimensional forms, in contrast to the three-dimensional forms used in the Rizzoli Building. It contains a cornice that continues onto the cornice line of the Coty Building. The main entrance on 56th Street consists of a classical-style loggia. It contains a two-story etched glass window with depictions of zodiac signs. This window, designed by Thierry Bruet and Amy Rassinforf, is designed as an imitation of the Lalique windows at the Coty Building.
The tower contains a setback from Fifth Avenue and a setback from 56th Street. The tower's facade is made of gray Indiana limestone, white Vermont marble, and green and black granite, with an aluminum curtain wall. On the intermediate stories of the tower, there are ten window bays per floor on the north and south facades and eight bays on the east and west facades. The two outer bays on each side are set within limestone, and the windows between the outermost bays are accented by black granite strips between each floor. The windows themselves are arranged in a grid, contrasting with the stone. The outer bays have narrow horizontal sidelights made of black granite. The inner bays on each side are faced with Vermont marble, recessed slightly behind the outer bays. The mullions of the inner bays' windows reflect those of the Coty Building facade. The Vermont marble is cut into slabs; the builders initially intended to cut the marble into 4-inch-thick slabs, but slabs of that thickness were prone to cracking.
The architects chose to use limestone for its buff color, which would lighten over time. The limestone is cut into slabs. Because it was the weakest type of stone used on the facade, the limestone slabs are anchored via steel angles to an exterior wall behind them, made of steel and concrete. Horizontal bands of rusticated limestone wrap around the tower at the 14th and 15th floors and at the 43rd and 44th floors. These strips indicate the locations of the mechanical stories. There are thermal-finished quoins, made of green granite, at the base and at the top of the tower. At the top, there are bronze medallions.
Interior 712 Fifth Avenue has of space in total, though the gross square footage is . The main lobby is decorated with imitation-historic details such as a mail chute with a mirror finish. The lobby also contains modern details such as a curving Portuguese-limestone bench and a , curved glass wall. All of the ground-level structures are internally connected. Behind the facade of the Coty Building is a four-story atrium, which contains marble and French limestone finishes. In 1988, during the development of the current skyscraper, the developers signed a written agreement in which the atrium could not be used for retail. Furthermore, the second through fourth floors were designed with a direct view of the atrium. These stories were originally taken up by a Henri Bendel store. The store was designed with two elliptical staircases, as well as iron-railed balconies surrounding the atrium.
The upper floors are intended for boutique tenants, such as fashion companies. Each of the upper stories has a typical floor area of . Granite, marble, wood, and glass are used for decorations within the tower stories. Real-estate magazine The Real Deal said that the building's appeal to fashion companies came from the fact that "few views beat those from the towers of 712 Fifth Avenue".
The skyscraper has a concrete-tube frame to stiffen it against wind. The concrete cladding is thick on average and is placed along the tower's exterior, not connected to the core. The elevator shafts and emergency stairs were placed in one corner of the building. Weight loads from the upper stories are carried around the base to avoid placing loads on the Coty and Rizzoli buildings. Loads from the columns are horizontally shifted in small increments across a nine-story section of the tower, avoiding the need for a large load-transferring structure.
History 1907 structure
The Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church leased its parsonage, a four-story dwelling at the address 712 Fifth Avenue, to interior decorators L. Alavoine & Company in May 1906. The following March, Albert S. Gottlieb filed plans for a five-story store and office building at that site, on a lot measuring . The new structure, completed in 1908, was designed similarly to other residential buildings erected at the same time. At the time, the stretch of Fifth Avenue in Midtown was largely residential but was becoming more commercial. Christopher Gray wrote that the five-story structure was "elegantly designed, but still a business intrusion".
The new office at 712 Fifth Avenue was first occupied by L. Alavoine & Company, and the jeweler Cartier had offices on the third floor. The Cartier store opened in 1909 and operated until 1917, when it moved to the former Morton F. Plant House several blocks south. There were also numerous art galleries on the first floor. These included the galleries of Edward Brandus, which a Brooklyn Daily Eagle writer described as making visitors feel "in the presence of a distinguished and refined company". Another art dealer in the building, Arthur Harlow & Co., moved elsewhere in 1927. Glassware and silver importer A. Schmidt & Sons leased the ground-floor storefront, as well as part of the basement, in 1934 for fifteen years. L. Alavoine continued to hold exhibitions at the building during this time. Men's furnishings store Budd Ltd. leased the storefront in 1948. The building continued to house art galleries through the 1950s, including the Louis Carr Gallery, Associated American Artists Galleries, and Albert Landry Gallery. 712 Fifth Avenue was owned by the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church until 1959, when jeweler Harry Winston bought it.