55 Water Street Building

The 55 Water Street Building is an International Style skyscraper designed by Emery Roth & Sons, in association with , and built between 1969 and 1972 in New York, NY.

Its precise street address is 55 Water Street, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

In 2008 the 55 Water Street Building was awarded with the NYC AIA Desing Award.

55 Water Street consists of two towers: the taller, rectangular-shaped one to the south, and the shorter one to the north, with sloped walls and 15 floors. On the eastern side, the buildings share an elevated plaza known as the Elevated Acre, while on the southwest side is the public space currently known as Vietnam Veterans Plaza, formerly Jeannette Park.

The main tower and its shorter wing are connected across the first 15 floors.

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 2017 and 1999.

Emery Roth & Sons was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with .

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 55 Water Street Building a reality:

• The Office of James Ruderman in charge of Structural Engineering
• OTIS Elevator Company as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Uris Brothers as the Main Developer
• Jaros Baum & Bolles in charge of MEP Engineering

The 55 Water Street Building can be categorized as an International Style building.

The 55 Water Street Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and reinforced 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 sand-colored precast concrete panels, complemented by deeply recessed, bronze-tinted glass panels and aluminum frames.

Both buildings share a grid layout where the pre-cast concrete panels clad pillars and spandrels until the 15th floor. From the 15th floor and up, the taller tower loses the concrete spandrels and its facade is organized into 14 bays on the long side and 7 bays on the short side, using the rhythm created by the structural pillars that are pushed to the perimeter of the structure, and empathising the vertically of the building.