200 Liberty Street Building

The 200 Liberty Street Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Cesar Pelli & Associates, with Cesar Pelli as lead architect, and built between 1984 and 1986 in New York, NY.

200 Liberty Street Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• One World Financial Center between 1986 and 2014.
• 1WFC.
• Dow Jones + Ottenheimer & Company Building.

Its precise street address is 200 Liberty Street, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

200 Liberty Street, formerly called One World Financial Center, is one of the four towers that make up the Brookfield Place complex, located in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York.

The complex includes other significant buildings, such as the:

• 225 Liberty Street Building
• 200 Versey Street Building
• 250 Vesey Street Building

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 2020 and 2002.

Cesar Pelli & Associates, with Cesar Pelli as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Haines Lundberg Waehler.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the 200 Liberty Street Building a reality:

• M.S. Yolles & Partners in charge of Structural Engineering
• Olympia & York Battery Park Company as the Main Contractor
• WSP Flack + Kurtz in charge of MEP Engineering

The 200 Liberty Street Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The 200 Liberty Street Building was completed in 1986. At that time Postmodernism was the prevailing style. Fresh, bold and daring, architects were exploring the freedom of designing without having to follow the strict, sometimes arbitrary rules of a specific architectural movement (which ironically became a movement itself). The 200 Liberty Street Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The 200 Liberty Street Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete and steel slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade uses a non-load bearing curtain wall system. This means the curtain wall modules are anchored to the building's structural frame, typically by being attached to the edge of the floor slabs. The curtain wall system connects to the slabs using brackets, anchors, and mullions, which transfer the loads imposed by wind and temperature changes, to the building's primary structural elements.

This setup allows the curtain wall to accommodate differential movement between the facade and the structural frame, such as thermal expansion, floor deflection, or sway from wind forces. This system's integration with the slab edges also allows for continuous insulation and weatherproofing layers.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features light gray granite with cascading setbacks at different floor levels, complemented by square windows with blue glass set into the facades. As the building rises, the windows become larger.

On the north side, a ten stories high octagonal wing with an angled copper roof complements the tower .