Two 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
Two UN Plaza is located across First Avenue from the UN headquarters in Midtown Manhattan of New York City. Two UN Plaza is situated on the north side of 44th Street adjacent to and west of One UN Plaza. The United Nations Development Corporation or UNDC is a quasi-public institution that developed and presently operates all three buildings. UNDC operates and maintains the office space at Two UN Plaza. The hotel, which 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. Two UN Plaza followed this in 1983. As the name suggests, UNDC's principal tenants are the United Nations, the UN Development Programme, 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.
Two UN Plaza (also referred to as Tower Two, D.C. 2, or simply, "Two") opened in 1983 and is a 40-story mixed-use office building and hotel located between 44th and 45th Streets west of, and adjacent to One UN Plaza. The building includes 450,000 square feet of office space on floors 2 through 28, hotel space on floors 29 through 40, and separate ground floor office and hotel lobbies.
Two 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, and is a landmark status building, known as Landmark Site of the Borough of Manhattan, Tax Map Block 1337, Lots 14 and 7502." Two UN Plaza was built in modern architectural design.
Two UN Plaza is located on the east side of Midtown Manhattan along the East River in an area of Manhattan known as Turtle Bay. Two UN Plaza is adjacent to one of the most important buildings in the world: the United Nations. Two UN Plaza is located 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 Two United Nations Plaza as a modern art building. It mirrors One UN Plaza in design. 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.
Construction
Design and construction Two UN Plaza was designed and built from 1979–1983. KRJDA's project number was 7910, and was known as Phase II of the UNDC's plan for UN enclave expansion with 420,000 square footage. The $69.5 million UN Tower 2 was financed by a $75 million loan from Chemical Bank of New York and refinanced with $75 million in commercial paper. It was expected to run 3 percent over the initial cost estimate. Due to increased demand by the UN delegation after One UN Plaza was built, the combined office/hotel building needed another companion building due to the unanticipated commercial and financial success of Tower One. A few years after One was built, the long-anticipated building was finished in 1983 just west of Tower One. Though not a part of the original design, it was both commissioned by UNDC and designed by Roche-Dinkeloo as a 40-story "sister" building to One UN Plaza, "poured from the same mold." Andrea Dean stated it was "of a different design from the original plan but following the same formula as that of the [Tower One]." Both buildings are 44 stories high with offices on the lower floors and residential space above; the new tower has 115 rental apartments plus five suites, while the hotel has 289 guest rooms. Two UN Plaza is situated perpendicular to 44th Street and separated from One UN Plaza by thirty feet.
There is a large chamfer seen on the southeast corner of the building, with a sloping setback, and blue-green glass wrapping 26-stories of office space and thirteen stories of luxury apartments for UN delegation employees. A lobby and two bridges join the towers. Bridges are connecting both One and Two on the third and eleventh floors.
Planning As originally planned, the UN's project was to be a two-block complex for office, hotel, and conference space funded by the City of New York and New York State, developed by the UNDC. However, due to the economic recession and resistance from the Turtle Bay community and Tudor city residents, the large-scale project was abandoned in the early 1970s. Only the hotel at the corner of 44th and First Avenue was built. As Roche recalled, it was "really a leftover piece." The building was designed to "complement the adjacent glass-walled structure" which opened in 1975 ― Tower One on 44th Street ― and was projected to cost $50 million.
After Tower One was completed and operated successfully, the adjacent property became available. The thirty-thousand-square-foot property was owned by the Bishop family, who granted Litwin & Swarzman Developers a 99-year lease. Subsequently, the UNDC purchased the land from Litwin & Swarzman after successfully litigating the property. The decision to proceed with a second building of a different design from the original plan followed with "the same formula as that of the hotel," approximating but not challenging the older structure." To harmonize with the surrounding buildings and Tower One, Roche made use of similar sloping setbacks on the northern face, next to Uganda's mission to the UN, and the western face, "and maintained the innovative angling of blue-green glass which distinguished 1 UN Plaza." A deep chamfer is seen on the southeast corner of the tower. According to Dean, the building was planned to extend to 45th Street. Both towers have a tight, gridded facade "without window expression" — the grids do not conform to respective floors. Both towers are linked at street level with a wrap-around, shed-style canopy or porte-cochère — which is made to look like a continuation of the curtain wall above. Thus, the porte-cochère affords hotel guests and cars protection from the elements,
providing a shelter at the street level with an overhead glass apron that appears to form a continuous glass curtain wall. Both towers have cants or chamfers to make the transition between the larger office floors and the smaller hotel or residential ones. Most striking is the sharp chamfer Roche put on the southeast face of Tower Two. By doing this, Roche gave views of the river and street instead of peering into neighboring offices or residential kitchens, since only 30 feet separates the two buildings. "It is these carefully calculated angles and shifts in elevational directions and dimension that create constantly changing sculptural relationships between the two buildings as you move around them and allow the shapes of the second to play off the first to enliven the forms of both structures."
The estimated cost initially was slated to be $50 million, through corporation bonds, and turned over to the city as was accomplished with One UN Plaza, for which over $1 million in rentals would be realized upon completion. It was estimated that an additional 350,000 square feet of total space would be realised with the new building, of which 225,000 would be for hotel use.
Having been successful with earlier attempts to block construction of the earlier massive proposals, only minimal resistance was given by the neighborhood, who primarily voiced complaints of blockage of sunlight. Since the unoccupied building that existed on the site just north of One UN Plaza by the Bishop family was finally available, purchased, and litigated and obtained for use for the site, the plans finally went forward for constructing Tower Two. One UN Hotel's original lobby was T-shaped and significantly smaller than the updated lobby. The new lobby incorporates part of the old lobby (where it was located in 1 UN Plaza and the east elevators), and joins the steps to the Ambassador Grill.
Tower One and Tower Two stand side by side on East 44th Street and are separated by exactly 30 feet to conform to New York's building and zoning regulations, but are connected by a lobby walkthrough and skywalks at the 3rd and 11th floors between the office areas. Both towers are owned by the city and leased on a long-term basis to the UNDC. Two UN Plaza cost $69.5 million and was financed by a $75 million loan from Chemical Bank and refinanced with a "sale of $75 million in commercial paper." It was expected to run 3 percent over the initial cost estimate as planned. New York City benefits as well. Although the nonprofit corporation pays no real-estate tax, a provision of the agreement signed by UNDC and New York City increases the city's share of the surplus as the surplus grows. The surplus amounted to $3.5 million in 1981 and $2.3 million in 1982.
"By skillfully relating two simple geometric shapes, each fairly mute in itself, Kevin Roche has here forged a complex, eloquent work of art." Tower Two is multi-sided, but not "bizarre and attention-getting." According to Goldberger, it "reads as an abstraction, thanks to the skin of blue-green glass that covers it like a blanket, obscuring any sense of floor divisions or even of conventional windows, and its sharp-edged form plays off against the earlier tower beside it in such a way as to deepen and enrich both buildings." Like Tower One, the glass mullions do not coincide to the floor levels. "This is a building that breaks many rules – it relates in no obvious way to its surroundings, except, of course, to its neighboring tower and in a more distant way to the UN Secretariat Building. And in its unrelenting abstraction it eschews many of the details of a conventional building. Part of the reason it works well is that "Roche is an architect of uncommon lyricism in glass; he is able to surmount the mute quality of so much abstract architecture and turn abstraction into something graceful and articulate."
The scrutiny placed on Roche-Dinkeloo was favorable. "The buildings are literally, as well as figuratively, inviting. The new tower extends the entry canopy of the original United Nations Plaza tower, which looked like a piece of the glass skin peeled off to cover the sidewalk, and expands it into a large porte-cochere between the two towers. The theme of light and reflected light is used everywhere, but always with restraint – it is not easy to make an architecture of mirrors that does not seem excessive, but Mr. Roche has managed to do so; this is modernism at its most sensual."
Interior features First, and perhaps the most striking element of Two UN Plaza, is that the lobby is similar to Tower One, allowing for mirrored octagonal columns and skylights on the ceilings to bounce light in many directions.