60 Wall Street Building

The 60 Wall Street Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Roche Dinkeloo, and built between 1987 and 1989 in New York, NY.

60 Wall 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:

• JP Morgan Headquarters between 1989 and 2001.
• Deutsche Bank Building between 2001 and 2019.

Its precise street address is 60 Wall Street, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

In 2022, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates announced the modernization of the building, affecting its façade and interior. News of the atrium’s renovation has been met with resistance and regret from New York City’s preservation, architecture, and urban planning communities. This restoration was repeatedly stopped by New Yorkers.

Roche Dinkeloo was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

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 60 Wall Street Building a reality:

• WSP Cantor Seinuk in charge of Structural Engineering
• Tishman Construction as the Main Contractor

The 60 Wall Street Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The 60 Wall Street Building was designed in 1984. 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 60 Wall Street Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The 60 Wall 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 a steel-framed glass curtain wall, with thick horizontal bands of granite that extend from the corners, turning into much more subtle horizontal lines at the center of each facade.

The corners of the top 8 floors transform into a shape that resembles classical columns, which symbolically sustain a 12-meter-high copper-clad hipped roof that crowns the buidling.