- Tower 49
Infobox Skyscraper
status=Built
building_name=Tower 49
caption=Tower 49 - Looking southwesterly from Madison Avenue & 49th Street
floor_count=45 above ground
opening= 1985
antenna_spire=187 m (614 ft)Tower 49 is an office
skyscraper in theMidtown Manhattan district ofNew York City .While nowhere near as illustrious as its neighbours at
Rockefeller Center it is of principal architectural note because it provides an elegant solution to the problem of an irregular building lot.In this case the lot is fronted on both 48th Street and 49th Street between
5th Avenue andMadison Avenue . The street frontages were offset by about the width of an NYCbrownstone lot on both sides.To answer this design challenge, the firm of
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill came up with a simple crystalline form of two chamfer-cornered masses joined by the central service core and wrapped in blue-tinted mirror glass.There are several buildings in the city with similarly irregular lots but this one shines because it looks like a design that didn't made compromises to the lot.
A typical example of the offset lot design problem in
New York City is the [http://www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=115177 Squibb Building] which occupies a midblock site between 5th & 6th Avenues and 56th & 57th Streets. As seen [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/] the 56th Street side was only able to obtain half the frontage of the 57th Street side and even at that, was offset by several metres.
Additional Items of Note
Tenants include the
Major League Baseball Players Association .Tower 49® is one of the few buildings to have an "®" as part of its official name.
ee also
*
Tower 42 ,London
*List of tallest buildings in New York City External links
* [http://www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=115430 Emporis entry on Tower 49]
* [http://www.greatgridlock.net/NYC_Images/tower49.html Online image of Tower 49]
* [http://www.geocities.com/angelluisc/Tower49.htm Elevation drawing of Tower 49]Tower 49 Gallery
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