The 461 Fifth Avenue Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Raul de Armas as lead architect, and built between 1988 and 1989 in New York, NY.
Its precise street address is 461 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.
In 2013 the 461 Fifth Avenue Building was awarded with the BOMA 360.
The building underwent a major restoration in 2018. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was SL Green.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Raul de Armas as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.
Commonly known as SOM, the firm was founded in Chicago in 1936 and has grown to be one of the largest architecture firms in the world.
Even long after its founders passed away, SOM has remained at the top of worldwide architectural excellence by attracting visionary architects. Amongst their most notorious partners we find names such as Gordon Bunshaft, Bruce Graham, Walter Netsch, Adrian Smith, Myron Goldsmith or David Childs.
SOM has also managed to grow and evolve to tackle the architectural challenges of each time, whatever those might be, and today is committed to aspects as important as efficiency and sustainability, as core values of their designs.
With a legacy spanning decades, SOM continues to shape the skylines of cities around the world, and is a usual contestant in any competition or selection process to design large-scale or iconic buildings and structures.
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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Mitsui Fudosan, London & New York Estates, and Colonial Property Group as the Main Developer.
The 461 Fifth Avenue Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.
Postmodernism in architecture emerged in the United States during the late 1960s as a reaction against the starkness of the International Style, which part of the new generation of architects argued was too impersonal, sterile, and disconnected from historical and cultural contexts.
Postmodernism challenged the International Style's austerity by reintroducing historical elements and ornamentation, although this time not as literally as in the Neo-Classic buildings. Instead, they reinterpreted them within the context of modern materials and construction techniques.
Postmodern buildings often feature bold, contrasting colors, unconventional forms, and a playful blend of various architectural elements from different eras and cultures.
In the United States, Postmodernism was not just an aesthetic choice but also a philosophical stance. It represented a democratization of design, where architects sought to create buildings that were accessible and meaningful to a broader range of people, not just designers and intellectuals.
The 461 Fifth Avenue Building was completed in 1989. 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 461 Fifth Avenue Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.
The 461 Fifth Avenue Building reaches an architectural height of 377ft (115m). It has a total of 28 floors, 26 above ground and 2 basements, served by 8 elevators, which combined offer a total of 210,004 sqf (19,510m2) of usable space.
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1989, the 461 Fifth Avenue Building has mainly been used as Commercial space.
The 461 Fifth Avenue Building uses a trussed-frame structure made of steel columns and steel, concrete slabs.
A trussed-frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight, and diagonal elements to provide stability against horizontal forces such as wind or seismic activity by triangulating the structure. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.
The facade is non-load bearing either, as it is common in trussed-frame structure type buildings.
From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a panelized curtain wall made of pre-cast concrete and glass. One of the main features of the building is the exposed trusses, which act as structural elements to support horizontal forces, as well as decorative elements of the facade.
The tower sits on a 9-floor high curved base forming a corner clad in prefabricated concrete panels, with retail storefronts and windows.
The building is then topped by a green copper mansard roof.
