One United Nations Plaza is a mixed-use building in Turtle Bay, Manhattan that was designed for the United Nations by Kevin Roche & John Dinkeloo.
Description
One UN Plaza is a mixed-use building in Turtle Bay, Manhattan that was designed for the United Nations by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo. One UN Plaza is located across First Avenue from the UN headquarters in Midtown Manhattan of New York City. One UN Plaza is situated on the north side of 44th Street. The United Nations Development Corporation or UNDC is a quasi-public institution which developed and presently operates One UN Plaza. UNDC operates and maintains the office space at One UN Plaza. The hotel, which today occupies both One and Two UN Plaza, is operated by the Millennium Hotel Group and is known as the Millennium Hilton New York One UN Plaza. The hotel/office complex was built in stages due to public outcry and lack of funding. Due to a general economic recession and community opposition in the late 60s and early 70s, the large-scale plans for an office/hotel complex and conference space were tabled. Thus, One UN Plaza was built first in 1976. This was followed by Two UN Plaza in 1983. As the name suggests, UNDC's principal tenants are the United Nations, the UN Development Programme, UNICEF, and other missions to the UN. The Millennium Hilton New York One UN Plaza is a privately owned hotel and occupies the lobby, the upper floors, the swimming pool, and the tennis/racquetball courts.
One UN Plaza (also referred to as Tower One, D.C. 1, or simply "One") opened in 1975 and is a 39-story mixed-use office building and hotel, the first of its kind in New York City. It is located at the northwest corner of 44th Street and First Avenue. The building includes 420,000 square feet of office space on floors 2 through 26, hotel space on floors 2, then 27 through 39, and separate ground floor offices and hotel lobbies.
One UN Plaza is registered with the City of New York as "783–793 First Avenue and 335–343 East 44th Street, and 323–333 East 44th Street and 322–334 East 45th Street". They are landmark status buildings, known as Landmark Site of the Borough of Manhattan, Tax Map Block 1337, Lots 14 and 7502." Both were built in modern architectural design.
One UN Plaza is located on the east side of Midtown Manhattan along the East River, in an area known as Turtle Bay. One UN Plaza is adjacent to one of the most important buildings in the world: the United Nations. The group of One, Two, and Three UN Plaza buildings are in the most important part of Manhattan.
If Manhattan is the center of the city (of all five boroughs), then Midtown Manhattan is the center of the hub. "Here are most of the elements one expects to find in a city core: the major railroad and bus stations, the vast majority of hotel rooms, the biggest stores, the main public library and post office. All are located in Turtle Bay."
Architecture Roche-Dinkeloo planned One United Nations Plaza as a modern art building. It has a 505-foot-tall slab and 360,000 feet of office space on the first 26 floors and a 292-room hotel on the top thirteen floors. At 505 feet in height, the building is three feet shorter than the UN Secretariat, in line with zoning restrictions for the district. It is the first building in New York City to be both an office building and a hotel.
The builder for One UN Plaza was the Turner Construction Company. One UN Plaza was formally opened on November 20, 1975, after undergoing a tumultuous planning period which spanned almost a decade and two New York City mayoral administrations. The building was the newest addition to the United Nations, located to the east across the street on First Avenue.
Features
One UN Plaza was designed and built between 1968 and 1975 for the UNDC. It was referred to by KRJDA as project number 6904, and Phase I of the UNDC's UN enclave with 590,000 square footage. Unlike the UN Secretariat which is oblong, One UN Plaza is an L-shaped building. Its footprint is hexagonal viewed from the top-down. There are some interesting setbacks in order to carefully integrate New York's zoning regulations: three architectural indentations which are not happenstance. According to Roche, there are three possibilities in designing skyscrapers to abide by the existing zoning laws in New York City, which will be discussed in this article. These possibilities were realistically "meant for rectangular buildings and blocks". By putting the tennis court on the top floor of the building, its dimensions were set. The first twenty-six floors were designed for office space, since they are the largest floors. The top eleven floors were designed for the hotel, with the smallest square footage. The hotel floors were required to be 65 feet, whereas the office floors were required to be wider. Hence, the walls slope inward from the offices to the hotel.
The pool and health facilities are in the hotel portion. There is another slope where it adjoins the height of the US Mission to the UN, in order to align with, or recognize, the street line. At the southeast corner of the building, it is cut in to reflect the height of buildings across the street. The entire exterior is covered with a 3 X 5 foot grid of glass which "unifies the surface of the office building and the hotel and creates a very fine texture.
New York City's zoning laws stated that if the northern face were all windows — as initially planned — they had to be 30 feet from its next-door neighbor, the United States Mission to the United Nations — up to the height of its facade. However, as the plan evolved, only 50 percent of the facade had functioning windows, placing it conveniently in a different zoning category. Therefore, the required setback was proportionally reduced to 15 feet. It has been logically assumed that Roche favorably used these zoning laws and rationalized the placing of the lower slant-back exactly at the point where the 15-foot rule no longer applied, "pitching the resultant plane up to that point where the 30-foot rule would have been" applied. Following this same logic, the higher 28th-floor slant-back is exactly at the point where the next setback rule would have been applied, "pitched to a point that marks the overall width of two typical hotel rooms plus a corridor, or roughly 60 feet".
The steel-frame structure is covered by an aluminum curtain wall with reflective glass. Although Mies van der Rohe first thought of an all‐glass skyscraper as early as 1921, it took a few more years for the glass curtain wall to evolve. Masonry continued to play a major role until after World War II, although glass had begun to make major inroads in such buildings as the Starrett–Lehigh Building on the block bounded by West 26th and 27th Streets and 11th and 12th Avenues in New York City. The first massive all-glass‐wall effect was first achieved in 1950 at the U. N. Secretariat. After the UN Secretariat, the second most influential glass curtain wall was the Seagram Building, designed in 1958 by Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson and Kahn & Jacobs, which "ushered in amber and bronzed monoliths, and its elegant, muted approach is still copied here and around the world". Initially, Roche considered the glass facade to be a polychrome glass with alternating primary colors, red and blue. Later, he chose an absolutely uniform surface, the color of which emphasizes the building's geometric changes in setbacks. When Roche asked the UN Secretary General for his opinion on the choice of red and blue, he was "unhappy with the idea". Roche then related it closer to the UN Secretariat glass color, which is green. According to Roche, this was his "minimalistic expression of the building's design, by using a uniform, small-textured skin to create a sculptured form, and by using reflective surfaces to delineate the form: dark, medium, light. When asked about deviating from the traditional and his design's modern look, Roche insisted that "any building is still crafted from traditional methods and is the same, whether it is traditional or modern." Plaza One has a glass skin with some solid wall behind it. Roche Dinkeloo had already opened a "new chapter as they pioneered the use of reflective glass in Bell Telephone's Development Center in Holmdel, N.J., in 1962." Lefer has suggested that "freedom in the use of glass enabled architects to design impressive structures, and that people prefer to live and work In buildings that have windows. The glass used by Roche-Dinkeloo is the third generation in reflective glass, which has a mirror-like coating on the glass to bounce back some of the sun's rays and heat, but is thin enough to see through from the inside. At night, one can see into a lighted space from the outside, but one cannot see out.
"It is not all transparent from the inside. It is glass used as a building material which is not necessarily transparent. Some of it is transparent, but glass is used over the solid parts because it is a very hard, impervious material which could last forever." There are four rows of windows for each floor and because the smaller‐than‐normal windows are uniformly distributed without protruding mullions, the effect is of a flat texture." "Stretched taut like a well‐fitted glove, the glass facade carries over the new building's stepped‐out and stepped‐back planes. Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo (KRJDA) attempted to recreate the "Crystal Palace" look and succeeded, as they pursued the greenhouse look. Subsequently, manufacturers developed new types of glass. Nathan Silver of Harper's may have said it best: "Perhaps the architects remembered Steinberg cartoons (cartoonist for The New Yorker) of buildings made from graph paper and thought, there is a realism here, we ought to do this-to design the most flat, repetitious, scaleless (four layers of grid per floor level confuse the eye), paperlike (the colored and partly silvered glass appears opaque) skin yet... Its designers see themselves as artists, not idea men."
These slant-backs, or lean-tos, on the northside face do so for approximately the eastern one-third of the building. The western two-thirds of the building juts out at approximately 45 degrees to increase its square footage for about a third of the total length of the northern face, then returns parallel to conform to the southern face's configuration. On the northern side of the building, the upper stories were made to indent, as already mentioned. These two "atypical" setbacks or "slantbacks" sheathed in glass are laid at 45-degree angles. The setbacks are angled from the 12th floor and again, from the 28th floor up to 45 degrees. The slantbacks form a "lean-to" or "shed-like" appearance so much that the building appears "continuously wrapped" or flowing in aluminum and glass. The setbacks are placed above the office stories which have a larger floor area. The third setback, on the southeast corner of the building, is architecturally opposite to the northern face's slant back: a "slant-out" or chamfer. The slant-out angles up to the 12th floor, below which the corner of the building appears to have been sliced off.
Also, it is no coincidence that the slant-out occurs at exactly the same height as the Church Center for the UN: the 12-story building directly across the street on 44th Street. Roche's attention to the building's surroundings rationalized the logical aesthetic look to "deflect one's attention across 44th Street and to the visual panoply of the UN" as one drives north up the UN Plaza street or walks south (note: UN Plaza is a one-way street, running only northbound, as First Avenue was diverted underground and parallels the UN Plaza street to reduce traffic). The building is skirted by a second-story facade that slopes outward, thus creating a canopy above the ground floor. By accommodating the specific zoning laws of New York City, the result was an instant success.