Axa Equitable Center

The Axa Equitable Center is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, and built in 1986 in New York, NY.

Axa Equitable Center 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 Axa Equitable Center is also known, or has been known as, Equitable Center, AXA Center, AXA Equitable Tower, or 787 Seventh Avenue.

Its precise street address is 787 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The main tower is linked to an 8-story smaller tower on its east side by a two-story bridge structure at the 7th and 8th floors, creating an arcade over 6½ Avenue. It is one of six passageways that form 6½ Avenue.

Entering from Seventh Avenue, one enters a five-story cubic atrium with a semicircular marble seating and a circular marble fountain surrounded by trees.

Edward Larrabee Barnes 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 Axa Equitable Center a reality:

• Severud Associates in charge of Structural Engineering
• Turner Construction as the Main Contractor
• Equitable Life Assurance Society as the Main Developer
• Roy Lichtenstein, and Scott Burton as the collaborating Artist

The Axa Equitable Center can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Axa Equitable Center was completed in 1986. 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 Axa Equitable Center was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The Axa Equitable Center 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 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 Brazilian brown granite cladding the 7 structural pillars that organize the facade in 6 bays, and Indiana limestone alternating with glass windows on each floor creating a horizontal ribboned pattern.

On the roof of the last setback, the Axa boardroom is framed with brown granite and features two large arched windows on its east and west facades.