General Motors Building

The General Motors Building is an International Style skyscraper designed between 1964 and 1965 by Edward Durell Stone & Associates, with Edward Durell Stone as lead architect, in association with Emery Roth & Sons, and built between 1965 and 1968 in New York, NY.

General Motors Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as GM Building.

Its precise street address is 767 5th Avenue, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The General Motors Building has received multiple architecture awards for its architectural design since 1968. The following is a list of such prizes and awards:

• Award of Merit in the Adaptive Reuse category by the New York Construction News in 2006
• Chairman’s Reception Honoree by the GNYCUC in 2006
• Award of Excellence in the Commercial Large Projects category by the AIA New York in 2007

The building features a public plaza on Fifth Avenue, which was originally below street level and considered unattractive and underused. In 1999, it was raised to street level, with groves of trees, fountains, benches, and an underground retail pavilion added. In 2005, the plaza was remodeled again for the construction of the Apple Fifth Avenue store, featuring a nearly 10-meter-high glass cube that provides access to the store via an elevator and a spiral staircase.

The building has been restored 3 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 2003, 2008 and 2019.

Edward Durell Stone & Associates, with Edward Durell Stone as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Emery Roth & Sons.

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 General Motors Building a reality:

• James Ruderman in charge of Structural Engineering
• London Merchant Securities as the Main Developer
• Jaros, Baum & Bolles in charge of MEP Engineering

The General Motors Building can be categorized as an International Style building.

The General Motors Building was designed in 1964. By 1964 the International Style movement had already left its early days behind and could be considered a mature movement, which does not mean it was loved and accepted by everyone, on the contrary. The International Style was accepted by the architecture community way before it was by the general public, and it is therefore likely that the General Motors Building was not well received by everyone at the time.

The General Motors Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete, 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 vertical pillars of white Georgian marble that slightly taper from the base to the top, some of these pillars are structural, while others serve a purely aesthetic function, creating narrow glass bays in between them. The rhythm and proportion of these vertical stripes accentuate the building's verticality.

At ground level only the structural pillars make it to the ground, where they create a two-level loggia.