Paramount Plaza

The Paramount Plaza is an International Style skyscraper designed by Emery Roth & Sons, and built between 1967 and 1971 in New York, NY.

Paramount Plaza is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Uris Buiding between 1970 and 1973.
• 1633 Brodway between 1973 and 1980.

Its precise street address is 1633 Broadway, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The building houses the Gershwin Theatre on the second floor with 1,900 seats and the Circle in the Square Theatre in the basement, with 650 seats. At the base of the building, a walkway connects 50th and 51st streets and serves as the entrance to the theaters..

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 1989, 2012 and 2014.

Emery Roth & Sons 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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Uris Buildings Corporation as the Main Developer.

The Paramount Plaza can be categorized as an International Style building.

The Paramount Plaza 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 dark, reflective glass windows framed by thick black bands both vertically and horizontally, which create a continuous grid that repeats all the way from the street level to the top of the building. Each window is also adorned by two light-colored aluminum mullions running vertically from the second floor, also until the top of the building.