28 Liberty Street Building

The 28 Liberty Street Building is an International Style skyscraper designed between 1955 and 1957 by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with J. Walter Severinghaus as lead architect, and built between 1957 and 1961 in New York, NY.

28 Liberty Street Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. Between 1961 and 2015 it was also known as One Chase Manhattan Plaza.

Its precise street address is 28 Liberty Street, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The 28 Liberty Street Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of New York and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the International Style style. Because of that, the 28 Liberty Street Building was officially declared as a national landmark on February 10^th 2009.

The scope of the project also included an extensive plaza with a circular sunken garden.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2016 and 2018. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with J. Walter Severinghaus as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

But that's not all, there was also a whole team of architects involved, which included: Gordon Bunshaft , and Jacques E. Guiton.

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 28 Liberty Street Building a reality:

• Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Weiskopf & Pickworth LLP in charge of Structural Engineering
• Turner Construction Company as the Main Contractor
• Otis Elevator Company as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Chase Manhattan Bank N.A. as the Main Developer
• Jaros Baum & Bolles in charge of MEP Engineering
• Dan Kiley Landscape in charge of Landscape Architecture
• Isamu Noguchi, and Jean Dubuffet as the collaborating Artist

The 28 Liberty Street Building can be categorized as an International Style building.

The 28 Liberty Street Building was designed in 1955. By 1955 the International Style movement had already left its early days behind and could be considered a mature movement, which does not mean it was loved and accepted by everyone, on the contrary. The International Style was accepted by the architecture community way before it was by the general public, and it is therefore likely that the 28 Liberty Street Building was not well received by everyone at the time.

The 28 Liberty Street Building uses a frame structure made of concrete and steel columns and concrete 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 of the building however, is load bearing. This doesn't imply that it is a traditional load-bearing wall. Rather, it means that the structure's exterior pillars have been pushed to the very edges, becoming integrated with the facade, and therefore, technically, a part of it.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a curtain wall system made of reflective glass an aluminum. The curtain wall is divided in bays by the perimeter structural columns, which are complemented by extruded aluminum mullions, shaped in an "H" form, that flank the windows. This combination of materials creates a distinct contrast between the smooth, reflective surfaces of the aluminum and the deep, opaque glass.

At ground level, the facade is recessed, creating a covered open space around the building, as it usually happens in most international style skyscrapers.