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In Detail: Eleven Times Square

In Detail: Eleven Times Square

All architecture, to a certain extent, is a response to the demands of external forces and interior programming. Eleven Times Square, however, a new speculative office tower designed by FXFowle now nearing completion on 42nd Street and 8th Avenue, goes further than most structures in deferring to its surroundings while catering to the needs of tenants. In the process, the skyscraper has moved beyond even its most environmentally friendly contemporaries—the New York Times Building, Hearst Tower, and One Bryant Park—to set a new standard for tall building design.

The tower’s sensitivity to the streets and structures around it is immediately apparent upon visiting Times Square. Though it stands 40 stories tall and encompasses 1.1 million square feet, the tower is far from imposing. In fact, it’s hardly noticeable. This is because at the northwest corner, after the sixth floor, the building steps back significantly. Higher up the elevation, it cants out again to regain floor space, creating a skewed profile, but the gesture is highly effective.

The south face echoes the massing of Piano’s Times Building next door, and features a solar shading system and highly reflective glass.  

Approaching from the west, the neighboring Empire Theater remains in plain sight, as does the Candler Building with its Coke bottle– green windows. The same is true of the opposite approach: Pedestrians can continue to appreciate the view of Raymond Hood’s art-deco masterpiece, the McGraw-Hill Building. These historic structures, so important to the character of the district, would have been obscured if Eleven had jutted straight up into the sky.

Eleven’s highrise neighbors to the north and south also influenced its form. The podium and setback tower motif echoes Arquitectonica’s Westin Hotel across 42nd Street, creating an open gateway to Times Square from the west. Meanwhile, the massing of the building’s south face mirrors Renzo Piano’s Times Building across 41st Street, with its cutout corners, sheer verticality, and horizontal detailing.

Following these disparate design cues created two different aesthetics and, for each, a distinctly defined side to the building. FXFowle harnessed this dynamic to create what might be New York City’s only solar-oriented skyscraper—a factor that added points to the project’s target LEED Gold rating. The south portion of the building features perforated aluminum sunshades—a nod to Piano’s exterior shading system across the street—and the glass is more reflective than in the north portion, which was outfitted with fritting at the upper regions of the vision panels.

Overall, the curtain wall is extremely performative. It is structurally glazed, meaning that there are no exterior mullion caps, which can create heat transfer points. The insulated panels are filled with argon gas rather than a vacuum, further adding to their insulation value.

In addition, stainless-steel spacers were used between the lites at the edges of the panels, where curtain walls lose most of their heat, rather than aluminum, which is one of the best conductors available. Altogether, Eleven’s envelope boasts a U value—or rate of non-solar heat loss—of approximately .28, making it more efficient than the curtain wall at 7 World Trade Center, a previous touchstone for highly insulated glass walls.

While allowing the context to mold their building, the architects did not give short shrift to Eleven’s unnamed future tenants. This meant maximizing flexible floor space, access to daylight, and views. The site itself is L-shaped, an awkward template for a skyscraper, but FXFowle again used the two-faced nature of the building to their benefit.

Like nearly all New York City office buildings in the post-9/11 era, Eleven has a composite structure of a concrete core and steel-framed bays, marrying the security of the former’s rigidity and fire resistance to the versatility inherent in the latter’s long-span capabilities. The architects couched the core in the crook of the L, keeping the street faces open and dividing the north and south sides into distinct spaces, each large enough to accommodate disparate programming.

Eleven’s plan also turned out to be a boon for views of the city. The cutouts made on the south face created a kind of bay window, adding to the panoramas and daylight available to tenants—factors that earned more points in the LEED tally. The north side, however, is even more of a view machine.

FXFowle rotated the canted portion of the building, a volume known as the crystal, by several degrees to the west so that the north-facing windows did not look out directly onto the Westin, but instead opened up dramatically to nearly unobstructed vistas—at least on the upper floors—of the Hudson River and New Jersey. The crystal also features perimeter columns pulled back from the facade, creating cantilevers of as much as 15 feet ending in unbroken expanses of glass.

The architects were also able to avoid placing columns in the building’s many corners, a consideration that will no doubt add to the allure of these locations for offices, while at the same time perhaps opening them up to more than just the upper echelon of the corporate chain.

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