Lipstick Building

The Lipstick Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed between 1981 and 1983 by Johnson/Burgee Architects, and built between 1983 and 1986 in New York, NY.

Lipstick Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as 53rd at Third.

Its precise street address is 885 Third Avenue, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2024. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was MdeAS Architects.

Johnson/Burgee Architects 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 Lipstick Building a reality:

• Irwin Cantor in charge of Structural Engineering
• Gerald D. Hines as the Main Developer
• Cosentini Associates in charge of MEP Engineering
• Zion and Breen Associates in charge of Landscape Architecture

The Lipstick Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Lipstick Building was designed in 1981. 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 Lipstick Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The Lipstick Building uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with steel columns and concrete slabs.

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 employs a non-load bearing curtain wall system. This means the curtain wall modules are anchored to the building's structural frame at the edges of the floor slabs. The perimeter columns are set back slightly from the facade, allowing them to remain independent of the curtain wall system.

This configuration enables a completely free design of the curtain wall, unencumbered by structural elements, thus providing greater flexibility in aesthetic choices and maximizing the visual impact of the exterior.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a combination of red and gray granite panels is interspersed with continuous bands of ribbon windows, emphasizing the building's distinctive elliptical shape, which has earned the building a place amongst New York City's most iconic structures.