One Astor Plaza

The One Astor Plaza is a Modern Style skyscraper designed by Kahn & Jacobs, with Der Scutt as lead architect, and built between 1968 and 1972 in New York, NY.

One Astor Plaza is not the only name you might know this building by though. Between 1972 and 1976 it was also known as W.T. Grant Building.

Its precise street address is 1515 Broadway, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

In 2012 the One Astor Plaza was awarded with the International TOBY Award.

The building was designed with two theaters: the Minskoff Theatre, a Broadway house located on the third floor, and a cinema in the basement, the Loews Astor Plaza, which has subsequently been converted into an event space known as Palladium Times Square..

The building underwent a major restoration in 2008. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Kohn Pedersen Fox.

Kahn & Jacobs, with Der Scutt as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Ben Schlanger.

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 One Astor Plaza a reality:

• Shmerykowsky Consulting Engineers in charge of Structural Engineering
• Sam Minskoff & Sons, Inc. as the Main Developer
• Chris Cosma as the collaborating Artist

The One Astor Plaza can be categorized as a Modern Style building.

The One Astor Plaza was completed in 1972. by then, Modernism had already past its maturity, and other styles, such as Postmodernism or Brutalism were already challenging its principles.

By their own nature, the Modern and International Styles can still look current, even in contemporary buildings. So that's not to say the One Astor Plaza appeared old or outdated when it was completed, but Kahn & Jacobs certainly did not take many risks when it came to choosing the design style. This made the building look more "classic" and integrated within the city's architecture.

The One Astor Plaza uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with concrete and steel columns and concrete and steel 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 Minskoff Theatre occupies several floors at the base of One Astor Plaza with a wide and open space, requiring that the columns supporting the upper floors in this area do not rest directly on the foundations. On the theater’s roof, a Vierendeel truss resting on two beams and large-span trusses distributes the loads from the upper floors along the entire perimeter of the building, eliminating the need for internal columns in the theater area, allowing the theater to remain column-free and functional

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features mostly dark glass with clear aluminum mullions.

The glass volume is organized by 4 triangular solid cores clad in stone. These volumes emerge on each of the four facades, creating a vertical design element that breaks the continuity of the glass volume .