One Worldwide Plaza

The One Worldwide Plaza is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with David Childs as lead architect, and built between 1986 and 1989 in New York, NY.

One Worldwide Plaza is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as 825 Eighth Avenue.

Its precise street address is 825 8th Avenue, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

One Worldwide Plaza is the largest tower in a three-building mixed-use complex, featuring both commercial and residential spaces, located in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2008. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Western Specialty Contractors.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with David Childs as the lead architect, 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 One Worldwide Plaza a reality:

• Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in charge of Structural Engineering
• HRH Construction as the Main Contractor
• William Zeckendorf Jr. as the Main Developer

The One Worldwide Plaza can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The One Worldwide Plaza was completed in 1989. 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 One Worldwide Plaza was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The One Worldwide Plaza uses a frame structure made of steel columns and steel and reinforced concrete 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 granite and precast concrete at the base of the building, continuing with a brick facade topped by a copper pyramid-shaped roof with a illuminated glass pyramid tip nicknamed “David’s Diamond”.