500 Fifth Avenue
THE 58-STORY, 625-foot-tall buff-brick 500 Fifth Avenue is the plain vanilla of modern classicism. Shreve, Lamb & Harmon’s asymmetrically massed tower is perhaps the closest realization of Eliel Saarinen’s influential “styleless” entry for the Chicago
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HARMON ,
1931
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h e 5 8 - s t o r y , 625-foot-tall buffbrick 500 Fifth Avenue is the plain vanilla of modern classicism. Shreve, Lamb & Harmon’s asymmetrically massed tower is perhaps the closest realization of Eliel Saarinen’s influential “styleless” entry for the Chicago Tribune competition because it has almost no overt historicist references. Built by the same architects who did the Empire State Building, in the same year, and on an equally prominent site on the northwest corner of 42nd Street, 500 Fifth Avenue nonetheless remains virtually anonymous. This is in part due its scale; the plot of 500 Fifth is less than a quarter the size of the Empire State, so the setbacks have less impact. But the lack of symbolic decoration cannot be discounted as the main reason for the lack of public recognition. The flat crown, which once featured the giant red numerals 500, is now just an exposed cooling tower. The tower lacks both the distinctive spire of the Empire State Building, and its dramatic contrast between plinth and shaft. In 500 Fifth, surface ornament and even the setbacks themselves become vestigial, so the emphasis is on the slab of the sheer, square-topped tower, a forerunner of the postwar office building. Shallow setbacks on the corner street fronts lead to a flush party wall on the uptown side that runs the entire length of the building.
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[ 1 ] Starrett Company workers were renowned for putting up their buildings in record time. [ 2 ] The entrance of 500 Fifth Avenue, right, is the façade’s most decorative feature. [ 3 ] The asymmetrical tower rises over “the most congested traffic section in the world.”
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The four-story limestone base of 500 Fifth is minimally decorated with celadon-colored metal spandrels, and incised foliate and frozenfountain motifs in shallow relief. The cornices of the shallow setbacks are accented with tan panels of abstract-patterned terra cotta, and a central bay of dark stone spandrels runs up the center of the Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street fronts. The only nod to the skyscraper’s grandiose self-image of the period is a relief of a gilded modern classical female figure above the entry, delicately fingering an architect’s model of the building itself. Inside, the lobby is almost shorn of ornament. The walls consist of pink-gray matched marble with little trim, under recessed lights. The only historicist touch is a pair of griffins that support the lobby clock. Without references to the past, the setback itself becomes the leitmotif, repeated in the base, and in the glass-andbronze entryway. As the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of 1925 mandated: “Reproductions, imitations and counterfeits of ancient styles will be strictly prohibited.” The next step was clear: architects looked at such a building and realized that little else needed to be removed in order to reduce architecture to its fundamentals of form, massing, volume, and structure.
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