One Chase Manhattan Plaza Building

The One Chase Manhattan Plaza Building is an International Style skyscraper designed between 1955 and 1956 by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Gordon Bunshaft as lead architect, and built between 1957 and 1961 in New York, NY.

One Chase Manhattan Plaza Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as 28 Liberty Street.

Its precise street address is 28 Liberty Street, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The One Chase Manhattan Plaza Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of New York and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the International Style style. Because of that, the One Chase Manhattan Plaza Building was officially declared as a national landmark on February 10^th 2009.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Gordon Bunshaft 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 Jacques E. GuitonJacques E. Guiton.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and the other architects already mentioned were in charge of the architectural design, however, architecture is a complex discipline, which usually involves 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 Chase Manhattan Plaza Building a reality:

• Weiskopf & Pickworth in charge of Structural Engineering
• Turner Construction as the Main Contractor
• Otis Elevator Company as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Dan Kiley Landscape in charge of Landscape Architecture
• Isamu Noguchi as the collaborating Artist

The One Chase Manhattan Plaza Building can be categorized as an International Style building.

The One Chase Manhattan Plaza Building was designed in 1955. By 1955 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 One Chase Manhattan Plaza Building was not well received by everyone at the time.

The One Chase Manhattan Plaza Building uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with steel columns and reinforced 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 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.

So the facade of the builing is techinically load-bearing, yes, however, in between the load-bearing colums we find a curtain-wall type of facade, which by itself would not be cosnidered load-bearing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features protruding structural pillars, clad in aluminum panels, surround the facade and rise uninterruptedly from the ground, where they form a colonnade, to the top of the building. Each section between pillars contains 6 windows flanked by H-shaped aluminum mullions.

At ground level, an elevated L-shaped plaza with a sunken circular garden transitions into the 9-meter-high lobby, surrounded by glass windows with silver and black frames.

Another material found at the One Chase Manhattan Plaza Building is travertine, found in the walls than enclose the six banks of elevators.