The Hearst Corporation’s new 46-story headquarters office tower is a celebration of architectural glass and metal. Created by award-winning firm Norman Foster Partners, London, the structure rises to its 597 feet height clad in an attractive, attention-getting curtainwall above the existing original historic six-story Art Deco building. 

Scheduled to open in September, the tower establishes a creative dialogue between old and new that results in harmony. The glass and metal tower with its cubic form shapes rises from the base of the original structure. A light-filled three-story lobby combines the two elements, and its most prominent element is a cast-glass water fall that makes a very unurban-like space.

The new building provides almost a million square feet of space, enabling one of America’s largest publishing companies to consolidate its entire New York City staff in one location and resonating with founder William Randolph Hearst’s original vision of a vibrant media hub at Columbus Circle.

Green Gold

The Hearst Corporation’s drive to create an improved workplace is articulated by the building’s light-filled, environmentally progressive status. Designed to consume significantly less energy than a conventional New York office building, and to be ventilated naturally for up to 75 percent of the year, the Hearst Tower is set to become the first commercial office building in New York City to achieve a Gold rating under the U.S. Green Buildings Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program.

“The Hearst tower expresses its own time with distinction, yet respects and strengthens the existing six-story historical structure. The tower is lifted clear of its historic base, linked on the outside only by columns and glazing, which are set back from the edges of the site,” explained Lord Norman Foster. “The transparent connection floods the spaces below with natural light and encourages the impression of the new floating above the old.”

Internal Plaza

The most spectacular space in the structure is the vast internal plaza—an urban room—that occupies the entire area within the shell of the historic base. Functioning like a bustling town square, this dramatic space provides access to all parts of the building. Linked on the outside by a transparent skirt of glass, which floods the spaces below with natural light, there is the impression of the tower floating weightlessly above the base.

Unlike a conventionally-framed structure, the tower has a triangulated form. This is not only a highly efficient solution, using 21 percent less steel than a traditionally framed building, it is also structurally more resilient. With its corners peeled back between the diagonals, the structure has the effect of emphasizing the tower’s vertical proportions and creating a distinctive facetted silhouette on the skyline.

The structure’s 25,000-square-foot curtainwall, designed and installed by Connecticut-based Permasteelisa USA, features a stainless steel diagrid. Of the curtainwall’s 3,200 glass panels, 625 are of different sizes due to the structure’s shape, with some up to 15 feet tall by 12 feet wide. The dramatic lobby area has 1,400 square feet of clerestory curtainwall, 1,400 square feet of custom skylight, and 2,100 square feet of interior stainless steel column cladding.

USG
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