One Vanderbilt is a 62-story supertall skyscraper at the corner of 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox for developer SL Green Realty, the skyscraper opened in 2020. Its roof is high and its spire is above ground, making it the city's fourth-tallest building after One World Trade Center, Central Park Tower, and 111 West 57th Street.
One Vanderbilt's facade and design is intended to harmonize with Grand Central Terminal immediately to the east. The building's base contains a wedge-shaped void, and the tower tapers as it rises, with several "pavilions" and a pinnacle at the top. The facade is made mostly of glass panels, while the spandrels between stories are made of terracotta. The superstructure is made of steel and concrete, and the interior spaces are designed to be as high as 105 feet (32 m). The lobby has a bank branch and an entrance to the nearby railroad terminal and the associated subway station, while the second floor contains the Le Pavillon restaurant. Most of the building is devoted to office space. The top stories contain the Summit One Vanderbilt observation deck.
SL Green acquired the site between 2001 and 2011 and announced plans to construct the building in 2012. A planned zoning amendment for the neighborhood failed in 2013, delaying the project for several months. TD Bank signed as the anchor tenant in May 2014 and after the skyscraper was approved one year later, the existing structures on the site were demolished. A groundbreaking ceremony for One Vanderbilt was held in October 2016. Topping out occurred on September 17, 2019, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed its completion. The building opened in September 2020, followed by the observation deck 13 months later.
Site One Vanderbilt is in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, just west of Grand Central Terminal. The building takes up the city block bounded by Madison Avenue to the west, the former alignment of Vanderbilt Avenue to the east, 42nd Street to the south, and 43rd Street to the north. The building's rectangular land lot covers , with dimensions of . Nearby structures include the Lefcourt Colonial Building and One Grand Central Place to the south; Grand Central Terminal to the east; the MetLife Building to the northeast; and 335 Madison Avenue to the north. In addition, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel and the Chrysler Building are one block east, while the Pershing Square Building, the Bowery Savings Bank Building, and the Chanin Building are to the southeast.
The skyscraper replaced five structures built as part of the Terminal City development around Grand Central in the 20th century. The 18-story Vanderbilt Avenue Building, a Warren and Wetmore-designed structure at 51 East 42nd Street, opened as a six-story office complex in 1902 and expanded in the 1920s. It had a two-story Modell's store that sold sport-related items. Some of 51 East 42nd Street's ornate facade details, including terracotta porpoises and cherubs, were saved by the developer and stored until the New York Landmarks Conservancy found a place for them. The 23-story building at 317 Madison Avenue, on the corner with 42nd Street, was designed by Carrère and Hastings and opened in 1922 as the Liggett Building. The Prudence Bond & Mortgage Building at Madison and 43rd, where Governor Al Smith once had gubernatorial campaign headquarters, dates to 1923. Two small structures along 43rd Street respectively housed "an Irish pub and a T.G.I. Friday's."
Pedestrian plaza As part of the construction of One Vanderbilt, the section of Vanderbilt Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets was decommissioned in September 2016 and redesigned as a pedestrian zone. Designed by PWP Landscape Architecture, the plaza covers . It measures long and wide, taking the entire width of the former roadbed of Vanderbilt Avenue. The Vanderbilt Avenue plaza contains five raised planters as well as LED lighting accents. Unlike other plazas in New York City, it lacks dedicated seating because the plaza was intended to facilitate pedestrian traffic rather than act as a meeting area.
Architecture One Vanderbilt was designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox. Severud Associates was the structural engineer, Langan Engineering was the civil engineering consultant, and Jaros, Baum & Bolles was the mechanical and electrical engineer. Structural consultant Thornton Tomasetti worked with Severud to create models for the building's superstructure. Hines Interests Limited Partnership was the project manager, and Tishman Construction was the general contractor. The skyscraper's top floor is numbered 73. According to The Skyscraper Center and building permits, One Vanderbilt has 62 usable stories above ground, while according to Emporis and Hines, the building has 59 stories. Early plans called for a 67-story skyscraper.
One Vanderbilt's roof is high; including its spire, it is tall. A building on One Vanderbilt's site would normally have been restricted to , but One Vanderbilt's developer SL Green was able to more than double this height with additional air rights. SL Green had transferred some air rights from the Bowery Savings Bank Building, and it received additional air rights from the New York City government by improving public transit and adding public space to the area. One Vanderbilt is the city's fourth-tallest building after One World Trade Center, 111 West 57th Street, and Central Park Tower. At completion, it was the second-tallest office building in the city after One World Trade Center. , the building is the 27th-tallest in the world.
Form and facade The design was required to harmonize with that of Grand Central Terminal. Because One Vanderbilt is taller than the nearby Chrysler Building, the city government unofficially encouraged its architects to create a "superior design". One Vanderbilt is set back from the street to allow better views of Grand Central. Also to improve views, the top section of the lowermost stories' facade slopes upward, while the bottom section slopes downward, creating a diagonal wedge. As a result, the lobby area on Vanderbilt Avenue (facing Grand Central) has a ceiling sloping from from west to east. Above the wedged base, the building tapers at higher levels, with a massing composed of four distinct shapes. The building's shape allows more sunlight to reach street level compared to alternative designs. Several alternatives were considered before the shape was finalized.
The facade consists mostly of a glass curtain wall with panels that extend from the floor to ceiling of each story. The curtain wall was fabricated by the Permasteelisa Group. According to Permasteelisa, the facade is made of 8,743 pieces in 1,060 distinct shapes, covering . Of these, about 660 panels are placed at the corners; they were manufactured in different shapes because the building slopes upward. There are two typical shapes of panels used in the facade: vision glass windows, which extend up to high, as well as ventilated spandrels between each story, which are made of terracotta.
Boston Valley Terra Cotta manufactured the terracotta spandrel panels between floors. According to Permasteelisa, there are 34,845 terracotta tiles used in One Vanderbilt's facade. Studio Christine Jetten designed glazing for the terracotta tiles. The panels contain gradual concave curves and are pearl-colored. The tiles reference the color and material used in Grand Central Terminal and were reportedly inspired by the terminal's ramps and Guastavino tile vaults. The tiles also alluded to the color of other office buildings on Madison Avenue. There are mechanical stories on the fourth, fifth, and twelfth floors. At these mechanical stories, there are vertical openings for intake and exhaust, which appear as part of the glass curtain wall.
The top of One Vanderbilt consists of a group of pavilions at different heights, which taper to the antenna. Between the main roof on the 60th floor and a point just above the 66th floor, there are C-shaped screens on the east and west sides, collectively known as "the crown". Diagonally sloped steel beams are visible on the exterior of the crown. The western section of the crown has aluminum accent strips on both the diagonal and horizontal beams. The eastern section of the crown has aluminum strips covering the diagonal beams and terracotta tiles covering the horizontal beams.
Structural features The building rests on a foundation measuring deep, with of concrete. The foundation contains of rebar and is anchored to the underlying bedrock using 83 tiebacks. The underlying bedrock could support loads of . The columns at the perimeter of the foundations are supported on spread footings measuring as much as across and thick. The perimeter walls themselves are up to tall and are composed of concrete with a strength of . About of rock had to be excavated for the foundation. Because the base of One Vanderbilt is directly above the train tracks serving Grand Central, several large box columns had to be custom-designed for the building. One such column at the southeast corner does not contain bracing between the ground and sixth stories, allowing the southeast corner to be cantilevered.
The superstructure consists of a steel-and-concrete mechanical core surrounded by a steel frame. The building uses more than of steel, manufactured by Bankers Steel, as well as of concrete. The steel was installed in the core first, with the concrete poured around it, which allowed the skyscraper to be constructed similarly to buildings without any concrete core. By the time Severud had published its "100% construction documents" that finalized the construction details, several stories of the steel frame had been erected. The method of construction allowed the steel inside the core to be erected six to twelve floors ahead of the concrete. At the base, the core walls are thick and can resist forces of . On higher stories, the core walls gradually decrease in strength to with a minimum thickness of . The rebar is made of 90 percent recycled material.
Most floors do not contain interior columns, and the steel frame contains beams that span up to from the core. On the three mechanical levels, the concrete shear walls around the core are reinforced by steel outrigger trusses. The office space requirements prevented lateral bracing or floor diaphragms from being used throughout much of the building, so many of the structural elements are unbraced for distances of up to . At the building's crown, the diagonal beams have a cross-section of , and the horizontal and vertical beams have a cross-section of . The top of the building is stabilized by a tuned mass damper system weighing around or .
Interior
Commercial and office space The interior spaces in One Vanderbilt are designed to be as high as . Underneath the building is a basement loading dock with a turntable, which is accessed by two truck elevators. The base includes a lobby covering . The interior of the lobby contains a bronze "art wall" and a starburst-shaped bronze installation suspended on metal cables. TD Bank was signed as the anchor tenant for the building, operating within a ground-floor space of .
There are also of tenant amenities in the building's base, including tenant valet parking at ground level. On the second floor is Daniel Boulud's restaurant Le Pavillon, accessed by its own entrance from ground level. The restaurant space covers and contains a ceiling height of , with a main room and an auxiliary room. On the third floor is an auditorium, a boardroom, and a flexible meeting space known as the Vandy Club. The flexible space has showers for executives as well as pantries. The third-floor amenities were designed by Gensler.