KPF’s Overhaul of a Madison Avenue Workplace Provides a Template for Upgrading Manhattan’s Business Inventory

New York Metropolis’s business actual property is going through an inflection level. Formalized remote-work insurance policies have sustained a downward spiral for Class B and C workplace buildings—these with fewer facilities or situated in much less fascinating spots. Common emptiness charges have risen from just below 10 p.c in 2020 to roughly 20 p.c right now. In distinction, demand for newer Class A workplace house has stabilized and even grown lately. That leaves builders with few choices. They may unload workplace buildings at fire-sale charges, spend money on capital-intensive office-to-residential conversions, or decide to wholesale renovations of business properties into top-tier workplace house.

The challenge blends new and previous subsequent to Madison Sq. Park. Photograph © Raimund Koch, click on to enlarge.

One Madison Avenue, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) for SL Inexperienced Realty and Hines, follows the latter course. The present 14-story construction, accomplished in 1958 and composed of a nine-story podium with a marriage cake of setbacks above, was an annex for the landmarked Napoleon LeBrun–designed Metropolitan Life Insurance coverage Firm Tower (1909) subsequent door (which was transformed right into a resort in 2015). SL Inexperienced purchased the annex in 2005. It was utterly occupied by Credit score Suisse, which, after the sale, renewed a 15-year lease. However the funding financial institution restructured following the worldwide monetary disaster in 2008 and determined to decamp in 2017, vacating in 2020. That left the developer with an empty 1.1 million-square-foot workplace constructing going through Manhattan’s enviable Madison Sq. Park.

In 2018, a trio of KPF, structural engineer Severud Associates, and contractor AECOM Tishman received the design competitors to reenvision the property. The group—who had already labored collectively at One Vanderbilt (2020) uptown, one other SL Inexperienced property—proposed a number of programs of motion, starting from a easy refurbishment to a wholly new tower on-site. However the constructing’s 90,000-square-foot flooring plates, which span a full metropolis block, had been an asset price retaining. “The plan that received the day, from an financial perspective, was to take care of and reimagine the 9 podium flooring and construct a brand new, fashionable tower above,” says Robert Schiffer, SL Inexperienced govt vice chairman.

The core was excavated right down to bedrock. Photograph © Raimund Koch

Building started in 2020; the addition of an 18-story tower atop the rostrum required demolishing the prevailing constructing core on the middle of the block-long flooring plate right down to bedrock and pouring a wholly new concrete shear core as a replacement. Every flooring inside the podium is studded with a good grid of columns. The design group studied eradicating each different column throughout every stage, however low floor-to-floor heights of simply 10 toes supplied inadequate room for transfer-load interventions. As an alternative, throughout every flooring, 9 of the prevailing columns had been strengthened with bolstered concrete, and 4 extra had been added to help the vertical load of the tower above. Some, known as “jumbo columns,” are 5 sq. toes.

“One of many preliminary ideas proposed reinforcing a whole bunch of columns and beams throughout the rostrum,” says Andrew Werner, KPF senior affiliate principal. “However our discussions with Severud decided {that a} new constructing core would remedy a lot of our load points.” As he explains, it additionally freed up house for Class A business infrastructure: bigger elevator banks, and improved lighting, mechanical, and electrical methods.

Present 4-inch-thick Alabama limestone cladding was cleaned and repaired the place attainable, and the design group sourced infill stone as wanted from the unique quarry. The small punched home windows of the unique facade—inefficient and less than New York’s vitality code—had been changed with a brand new double-glazed and unitized curtain wall system. On the spandrels, exterior crenellated metal going through was swapped out for painted aluminum positioned behind the glazing. To announce the first entrance, on Madison Avenue, three structural bays had been stripped of limestone, to get replaced with an identical curtain wall therapy.

The tower rises at a 124-foot setback from the rostrum, going through Madison Avenue, with the brand new constructing core at its rear, north-facing elevation. The transition from previous to new is delineated on the tenth flooring by an expansive terrace overlooking Madison Sq. Park, and, inside, by two ranges of double-height areas wrapped in triple and quadruple-laminated ultra-clear glass sheets of monolithic scale. There, the metal structural system of the addition is made wholly seen within the type of gargantuan, fiberglass-clad metal trusses that switch the gravity load of the addition to the column grid beneath. These structural choices, positioning the constructing core to the flank of the tower and transferring the addition’s vertical load by means of the trusses, allowed for 60-foot, column-free spans from the twelfth flooring upward. Additional contrasting the addition to the stone-clad podium and the Metropolitan Life tower are darkish gunmetal fileted frames working vertically each 15 toes and horizontally at each third flooring.

The tower setback makes room for a landscaped terrace, and its metal trusses switch vertical load to the rostrum. Photograph © Raimund Koch

The mechanical methods of the annex and the Metropolitan Life tower are shared, and providers needed to be maintained by means of every stage of development. The design group first needed to set up a brief mechanical room on the eighth flooring of the rostrum and cooling towers on the rostrum roof, ducts and pipes snaking between the 2 buildings, previous to dismantling the mechanical infrastructure embedded inside a portion of the 5 uppermost annex flooring to be demolished.

To complicate the challenge additional, the New York Metropolis Landmarks Preservation Fee required that any areas of the listed Metropolitan Life tower uncovered by One Madison Avenue’s partial demolition should be coated up later, in sort. As soon as the brand new system was in place—cooling towers situated on the constructing’s summit, a mechanical plant on the north facet of the tenth flooring—the design group carried out a sizzling lower, rerouting the ducts and pipes inside a good time-frame. The naked wall the place the methods and the landmarked tower meet was then clad in the identical Alabama limestone. “There was a component of open-heart surgical procedure right here, managing the mechanical system whereas deconstructing the constructing, all whereas coordinating with a mess of metropolis companies,” explains Werner. “It was an unorthodox course of, and we needed to stroll the Division of Buildings by means of what was basically steady deconstruction and reconstruction.”

Facilities are essential to Class A business growth, and One Madison Avenue contains a number of areas for them. On the rooftop, Le Jardin sur Madison, a 6,800-square-foot pavilion designed by Rockwell Group, clad in a limestone-like concrete rainscreen, welcomes tenants with a wood-paneled ceiling, lush furnishings, and sinuous steelwork, and a 5,000-square-foot landscaped terrace. La Tête d’Or, a Daniel Boulud steakhouse, additionally by Rockwell, situated on the floor flooring’s northeast nook, welcomes the general public into the constructing with a brasserie-inspired design that options marble and walnut flooring, material partitions, and glass pendants. Within the foyer, and beneath grade, the 7,000-square-foot Commons, designed by Vocon, is a shared tenant house providing each lunchtime catering and assembly areas.

The renovated foyer contains widespread areas. Photograph © Kevin Chu + Jessica Paul

One Madison Avenue considerably reached completion in fall 2023, some three months forward of schedule; with anchor tenants like IBM, Franklin Templeton, and Coinbase, it’s over 70 p.c leased. New York’s business real-estate market nonetheless faces substantial headwinds, however the adroit renovation in Madison Sq. is a hit story in a metropolis hungry for one. And it might present a highway map for the efficient repositioning of comparable properties throughout the metropolis.