Carnegie Hall Tower

The Carnegie Hall Tower is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed in 1987 by César Pelli, in association with Brennan Beer Gorman Architects, and built between 1988 and 1991 in New York, NY.

Its precise street address is 152 West 57th Street, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

In 1994 the Carnegie Hall Tower was awarded with the Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects.

The building is strategically positioned between the iconic seven-story Carnegie Music Hall and the renowned five-story Russian Tea Room on West 57th Street. The exterior's masonry and reinforced concrete design elements draw inspiration from the architectural details of its namesake.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2023. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Loci Architecture.

César Pelli was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Brennan Beer Gorman Architects.

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 Carnegie Hall Tower a reality:

• Rosenwasser/Grossman Consulting Engineers in charge of Structural Engineering
• HRH Construction as the Main Contractor
• Rockrose Development Corp as the Main Developer
• Cosentini Associates in charge of MEP Engineering

The Carnegie Hall Tower can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Carnegie Hall Tower was completed in 1991. By 1991 the Postmodernism movement was experiencing a transition. Critics argued that Postmodernism, initially a rebellious and innovative style, had become formulaic and commercialized, and so the trend started moving away from blending historical styles, irony, and playful ornamentation, and begun to give way to emerging architectural trends concerned with more present matters such as technology, ecology or sustainability.

The Carnegie Hall Tower uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with reinforced concrete columns and beams.

A framed tube-in-tube structure uses a central core, known as inner tube, which usually holds stairs, lifts and installations, and a perimeter of columns around it, which form the exterior tube. The interior tube is tipically more massive (often made of reinforced concrete), and the exterior tube is "lighter" (made of steel or concrete columns). Both tubes are conencted via horizontal elements which make up the floors and also transmit any horizontal froces from the facade to the core.

The facade of the building is load bearing. This is a direct consequence of the integration of the exterior "tube" into the facade, something which most framed tube-in-tube buildings do in order to liberate the interior space from structural elements and achieve a more flexible interior.

The choice to execute the entire structure in reinforced concrete guarantees the resistance of such a tall and slender building to the horizontal forces of wind, even more so than if it was executed in steel

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features brick cladding in three complementary colors, including some glazed bricks. The window frames, lintels, and decorative details are made of precast concrete, colored to harmonize with the terracotta ornamentation of the adjacent Carnegie Hall, which serves as the tower's base.

The tower rises above a six-story base and includes a notable setback at the 43rd floor.