200 Vesey Street Building

The 200 Vesey Street Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Cesar Pelli & Associates, in association with Haines Lundberg Waehler, and built between 1985 and 1986, for a reported $800 million dollars, in New York, NY.

200 Vesey 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 200 Vesey Street Building is also known, or has been known as, American Express Tower, or Three World Financial Center.

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

200 Vesey Street is the tallest tower of the four buildings that make up the Brookfield Place complex in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. The other three are 200 Liberty Street, 225 Liberty Street, and 250 Vesey Street. The buildings are connected to each other through a public space known as the Winter Garden.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2001 and 2002. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Pelli Clarke & Partners.

Cesar Pelli & Associates was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with 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 Vesey Street Building a reality:

• Thornton Tomasetti in charge of Structural Engineering
• Brookfield Properties as the Main Developer

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

The 200 Vesey 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 Vesey Street Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The 200 Vesey 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 pink granite panels framing a pattern of windows that cover the base of the building. After a few setbacks the facade continues with thinner panels of the same material, which accentuate larger windows framed in aluminum. The structure is crowned by a solid, four-sided green pyramid.