225 Liberty Street Building

The 225 Liberty Street Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Cesar Pelli & Associates, in association with Haines Lundberg Waehler, and built between 1985 and 1987, for a reported $800 million dollars, in New York, NY.

225 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:

• Two World Financial Center between 1986 and 2014.
• 2WFC.

Its precise street address is 225 Liberty Street, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The 225 Liberty Street, formerly called Two World Financial Center, is the second tallest building in the Brookfield Place complex in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York. The other three are: the 200 Vesey Street Building, the 200 Liberty Street Building, and the 250 Vesey Street Building. 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 César Pelli & Associates.

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 225 Liberty Street Building a reality:

• Thornton Tomasetti in charge of Structural Engineering
• Brookfield Properties as the Main Developer
• WSP Flack + Kurtz in charge of MEP Engineering

The 225 Liberty Street Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The 225 Liberty Street Building was completed in 1987. 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 225 Liberty Street Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The 225 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 toasted gray granite panels and square perforated windows with blue glass. As the building rises, the windows become larger.

The building rises on a four-story base. The facades feature cascading setbacks at different floor levels, and is crowned by a round copper dome-shaped roof.