Rockefeller Plaza West, New York, 1987-1990

The management of Rockefeller Center intended to build the last element of the Rockefeller Center complex, its western-facing entrance, on a site on Seventh Avenue, between 49th and 50th Streets and adjacent to Exxon Plaza in Manhattan. The building was to house offices, an educational-technical center for the performing arts, and was to link into the underground concourse network. The project won a Citation from Progressive Architecture Magazine in 1988.

The contrasting models of the modernism, Rockefeller Center and Times Square, form the context for the project, and inform its design. The lessons offered by these visions of the city have allowed for a consideration of the building as an assemblage, the pieces of which resolve the various site conditions, while the whole is both monumental and dynamic, embodying the energy of the modern city.

Four major elements compose the building. A central core pins the building to the site and defines it on the skyline, acting with the RCA Building as a bookend to the Exxon Building. Around this core laminations are placed, creating a condition of rotation which terminates the east-west axis of the complex and creates a new relationship to the Times Square valley to the south. The variety of scales created by these laminations, as well as their irregular composition, allows the building to graft itself onto the existing cityscape. The building is clad in limestone and glass, with metal ornamentation placed on the surface of the stone to articulate setbacks and to shimmer in the sunlight.

A two-tiered podium, stepped toward the west, defines the Seventh Avenue street wall. This surface is covered by electronic signage, and a building entrance is indicated by a tower of light. An irregular configuration is created at the Plaza to the east, resolving ground level site conditions and providing the main entrance to the building.

A portion of the building element facing Times Square is disengaged and transformed into an object made of glass and metal, specially lit at night, hovering over the Square and acting as an agent in its definition. The various incisions formed by the manipulation of the building mass are seen as habitable places to indulge in the fantasy of living in the sky which informs the myth of New York.

The project was subsequently abandoned due to the changes in the marketplace