1 and 2 UN Plaza
LIKE THE Citicorp Center, the UN Plaza buildings are an early departure from the Internationalist aesthetic of structural expression. While Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo’s Ford Foundation (1963–68) two blocks away reveals the anatomy of a skyscraper, like
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KEVIN ROCHE JOHN DINKELOO
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i k e t h e Citicorp Center, the UN Plaza buildings are an early departure from the Internationalist aesthetic of structural expression. While Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo’s Ford Foundation (1963–68) two blocks away reveals the anatomy of a skyscraper, like a building turned inside out, their glass-sheathed UN towers are as cryptic as possible, like a man hiding behind mirrored sunglasses. The blue-green skin, gridded with nearflush aluminum mullions, has the weightless, abstract quality of folded graph paper, or origami in glass. The surface tells you next to nothing about the building’s internal steel cage construction. The aluminum grid does not correspond the interior floor levels—the horizontal 4-foot, 7-inch by 2-foot, 7.5-inch panels divide the floors into four—so there is no way of telling visually how tall the building is. The lack of scale is heightened by volumetric illusions. From some angles, the creases of the building are so
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sharp that the planes of glass look perfectly twodimensional. At night, when interior lights are on, the sudden perception of depth in a waferthin plane appears to be an optical illusion. At street level, the façade billows into an unsupported glass skirt that floats like a hydrofoil. The buildings are marvelously responsive to atmospherics. Against a clear blue sky, the glass seems to dematerialize altogether, leaving only the gleaming grid of mullions so that the steel-cage is expressed after all, but in a refined and idealized way. The glaucous-colored glass looks different in shade and sunlight, adding a textured appearance. On overcast days, the mass of the building seems to simply drift off into the sky like trailing clouds. The tower forms play off of each other and the void of sky between them. The towers recapitulate and extend the history of skyscraper design. The earlier, 39story, 505-foot-tall No. 1 building is in the setback tradition, with a recognizable podium, shaft, and crown, but the transitions are steeply
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acute rather than orthogonal, highlighting their stylistic rather than structural role. No. 1 is quite anthropomorphic, with a “shoulder” and squarish head like a sphinx. There is a delicate contextualism for such large buildings: in color and structure, both towers are a tribute to their iconic neighbor, the UN Secretariat. The illusory scale of the grids is an indirect reference to the opaque glass panels on the north wall of the UN General Assembly. The 40-story No. 2 folds in at the corner up to its twelfth story, in deference to William Lescaze’s high-modernist Church Peace Center (1962) at the corner of First Avenue and East 44th Street. The mirrored interior is like a fun-house, fracturing space into planes of reflections, solids, and clear space. The beehive-pyramided reception area creates an infinity of mirrors and lights, a counterpart to the deceptions of the reflective façade. This is a postmodern update of the dark, faceted, Expressionist Chrysler and Daily N
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