Environmental obscenity: Norman Foster’s new skyscraper is an insult to the New York skyline | Build

AAmong the slender needles and elegant towers of the Manhattan skyline, a mountain massif appeared on the horizon. He makes his way above the others, climbing in huge steps in the form of several towers linked together, forming a dark, looming mass. From some angles, it forms the silhouette of a huge bar chart. From others, it glows like a coffin, ready to engulf the elegant Chrysler Building in whose shadow it trembles. He is New York’s last leader, a muscular, bronzed giant who now rules the city with brutal swagger.

It is fitting that this is the new global headquarters of JPMorgan, the world’s largest bank. The company has a market value of $855bn (£645bn), more than Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup combined, and appears to have swallowed all three into its colorful glass shell. Last year, for the first time, it generated more than $1 billion in profits per week. Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon likes to brag about its “fortified balance sheet,” and now it has an actual fortress to go with it — built at a cost, as he revealed in the opening, of about $4 billion. He definitely left his mark. It would be difficult to design a more dangerous building if you tried.

The Brobdingnagian pile is the work of Foster + Partners, led by 90-year-old Norman Foster, who is no stranger to creating extravagant bank headquarters. Its HSBC Tower in Hong Kong was the world’s most expensive building when it opened in 1986, an expensive essay in structural repetition, with a stack of steel suspension bridges mounted on its facade. One former partner described it as “a sledgehammer to crack a nut.” By comparison, the JP Morgan Tower is like using a bronze-plated bulldozer to mash peas.

The sheer amount of structural steel – 95,000 tonnes in total – is obscene for a building with just 60 floors at 423 metres, half the number of floors you might expect in such a giant building. It uses 60% more steel than the Empire State Building, and is taller and has more square footage. One senior engineer calculated that if the steel were flattened into a belt (30mm wide and 5mm thick), it would wrap around the world twice – a fitting symbol of the Bank’s stranglehold on global hegemony.

If the building is a bullying affront to the skyline, it is also dominant at street level. It emerges from the sidewalk with a massive array of steel columns that snake around every corner, holding onto the base of the tower like the fingers of Nosferatu. The columns were placed to avoid the train tracks below, holding the building’s bulging mass ominously above new strips of privately owned “public space,” where shallow steps and plantings seem designed to deter idleness. To the west, on Madison Avenue, a building greets the street with a disproportionate cliff face of carved granite boulders. This turns out to be the work of art by Maya Lin, who has accomplished the impressive feat of making real stone look like a fiberglass scene from Disney’s Frontierland, complete with mossy bits of ornament stuck in the cracks.

On the other side of the building, along Park Avenue, security guards will let you look through the windows to admire the U.S. flag hanging from the 12-meter-tall bronze flagpole at the top of the stairs in the lobby, which, in another surreal twist, flutters in an artificial indoor breeze. It is a rare work of art by Lord Foster himself, who intended the movement of the flag to reflect the wind conditions outside. On the calm and calm day of my visit, the water was rising violently. In this “city within a city,” JPMorgan can dictate the weather it wants.

Inside, everything is enormous. Grand walls of fluted limestone, sourced from a single quarry in Italy, rise through the 24-metre-high atrium, flanking a grand limestone staircase flanked by a pair of massive Gerhard Richter paintings. Banks of elevators transport the 10,000 workers to a vertical wellness and office world, complete with a 19-restaurant food hall (with kitchen-to-office delivery), a hair salon, meditation rooms, a fitness center, a medical clinic, and a bar. The column-free office floors are outfitted with circadian rhythmic lighting, creating a carefully calibrated environment, cut off from the outside world Las Vegas casino-style, with the hope that employees never leave their desks. Damon is serious about getting everyone back into the office full time, despite his employees’ pleas. This is his machine to crush the hybrid labor movement once and for all.

Ceiling heights may be high (adding more cubic feet of air for heating and cooling), but when a photo of the new trading floors was posted on social media, condemnation was swift. Comparisons have been drawn to factory-farmed chickens, Chinese sweatshops, and the cellular office spaces of the 1950s that the open-plan layouts are intended to avoid. The pronounced steel truss winding through the space somewhat undermines the “column-free” claims and raises questions about the structural logic of the building. One engineer who studied the plans notes that adding a few columns and reducing the spans by a few meters could have reduced the building’s carbon footprint by 20-30%. But then, Foster and Damon didn’t get the protein-fueled steel heroics they wanted, as they made their way through the building in massive Vs.

Beyond the structural swagger, they were also keen to enhance the theatrics at night. Every evening, from miles away, New Yorkers can now gaze in wonder and awe as the top of the tower transforms into a sparkling crown, sparkling with twinkling lights that rise up the façade like a huge flute of champagne. It’s the work of Leo Villareal, who recently lit up the Thames Bridges. Sometimes, a vibrant diamond shape adds the inevitable Eye of Sauron touch. At other moments, it seems to transform into a pulsating Greek void.

Aside from the church tower, what makes the extravagance of the inflated tower so disgusting is that it has seen a perfectly good office building needlessly bulldozed. The 52-story Union Carbide headquarters, built in 1960 as Nathalie de Bois’ famous work at SOM, was an elegant Miesian monolith. It even underwent a complete renovation and environmental improvement in 2012 – trumpeted by JPMorgan at the time as “the largest green renovation of a major building in the world”. Just seven years later, at the hands of the same ruthless bank, it became the tallest building ever to be deliberately demolished. To be replaced by something nearly twice as tall, but with only eight additional floors.

The reason this happened, beyond ego and greed, can be traced back to a zoning change in 2017. There was a growing fear among property owners in Downtown East that the area was losing its luster as the world’s preeminent commercial address. Office tenants were flocking west, toward the gleaming new corridors of Hudson Yards, in what is known in real estate parlance as a “flight to quality.” The city’s solution, in a short-sighted act of self-sabotage, was to allow downtown to model itself after the soulless wasteland of Hudson Yards. Incentives were offered to encourage demolition, including allowing the sale of unused “air rights” from landmark buildings within the 78-block district. This means that historic structures that have not filled the maximum allowed on their lots can sell their unused potential to others. JPMorgan acquired 65,000 square meters of air rights from Grand Central Terminal, and 5,000 square meters from nearby St Bartholomew’s Church, allowing it to expand its size beyond its usual limits.

What few expected was the cumulative effect that unleashing this scale of development would have. JPMorgan’s tower is not a standalone tower, but just the first of a whole new breed of steroidal super-talls. Permit was recently granted for a larger, 487-metre-tall, 62-storey tower at nearby 350 Park Avenue, also designed by Foster+Partners as another group of towers linked together, with the appearance of a discounted bulk purchase. SOM has obtained a permit for a similar-sized monster at 175 Park Avenue, and it is slated to break through the ground as more column fans converge to a point. This part of downtown will soon resemble a group of bloated bankers in stilettos, casting ever-longer shadows down the valleys of Manhattan and obliterating views of the city’s cherished pinnacles, while crushing a generation of beautiful, usable buildings beneath them.

From a distance, across the pond or in Australia, you might not care much about New York’s fate. It is a place long shaped by the forces of unbridled capital, where form follows finance, landowners are able to build “as a right,” and the citizens are cursed. But Foster’s bronze statue is a precursor to what may soon be built in London, on a larger scale. Last week, JPMorgan announced it would break ground on its 280,000 square meter European headquarters in Canary Wharf – the capital’s largest ever office building, containing more space than the Shard, the Gherkin and the Walkie Talkie combined. The design, also by Foster+Partners, is teased by a peek into a corner at ground level, showing some curved bronze fins encasing a bulging glass cylinder. Be prepared for what’s outside the shooting range.