Looks like Foster has done it again! Check out this beauty. Here's some brief info:

Proposals for a new 42 storey tower in Manhattan, to be placed over a landmark art deco building, have been submitted to the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission. This fulfils a dream started in the 1920s, when William Randolph Hearst envisaged the area of Columbus Circle as a vibrant new quarter for media, communications and entertainment. He asked the émigré Austrian architect, Joseph Urban, to design the first stage of a corporate Headquarters for his vast publishing empire. This was a six storey masonry block with a central courtyard, splayed corners and theatrical statuary. Finished in 1928, it was always intended to be topped by a tower, although no designs were ever recorded. Some seventy years later, such a tower is being proposed - the new combination of tall structure and a remodelling of the original base will provide almost a million square feet of space for one of Americas largest communications companies.

Statistics:

Gross area: 856,000 ft2 / 79,500 m2
Zoning Area: 721,000 ft2 / 67,000 m2 (120,000 ft2 / 11,000 m2 from subway bonus)
Typical Gross Floor area: 20,000 ft2 (1,900 m2)
Typical Floor to Floor Height: 4 m
Building Height: 597 ft (182 m)
Number of storeys: 42

And the Pictures:

High resolution rendering:

http://www.permasteelisausa.com/image/exteriors/Hearst2.jpg

Lobby interior:

http://www.permasteelisausa.com/image/exteriors/Hearst1.jpg

http://www.permasteelisausa.com/image/exteriors/Hearst3.jpg

http://www.imagestation.com/picture/sraid48/p6201ea90fae6aa21ddb59258359dd872/fcbe18fa.jpg

I just took 2 pictures of the base this weekend:

http://www.c-grayson.com/posted_images/march2003_construction/hearst_01.jpg


http://www.c-grayson.com/posted_images/march2003_construction/hearst_02.jpg

I've seen that design years ago, is it still alive then?

Yeah its alive. It is supposed to be starting construction soon, I think. I'm just wondering when? Anyone know?

the base doesn't really fit the building imo.. but the building alone looks cool

I always thought that the project was cancelled! Anyway, I like the tower and the art decó building!

I like the trianglar bracing. Makes it a good tower. I hope it gets approved and fufills the vision of Urban.

I think it's already approved.

I thought they would've started building this by now.

It was approved and allowed a tad extra height in exchange for renovating part of the subway station beneath.

I think the base structure should begin gutting next month (they will only keep the facades).

Anyone know where Hearst will move it's workers?

Great news all. The project is alive, and it's set for construction. Here's the article:

(Daily News)


Hearst house

The Hearst Corp. kicks off construction of its $500 million, 36-story add-on to its corporate headquarters today. The project will add a futuristic glass-and-steel tower atop Hearst's 76-year-old stone landmark.

London architect Norman Foster designed the addition, which will transform the squat, six-story building into a 42-story office tower. Foster ranked among the acclaimed architects tapped last year to submit design proposals for Ground Zero but was passed over in favor of Daniel Libeskind.

Some 200 employees have already started vacating the building, 959 Eighth Ave., at W. 57th St. Good Housekeeping - the magazine and its famed "institute," where products are tested for the seal of approval - moved to another Hearst building, 250 W. 56th St.

Top Hearst execs will move to the 10th and 42nd floors of 1345 Sixth Ave., at W. 54th St.

http://www.nydailynews.com/ips_rich_content/881-hearsttower.JPG

Rendering of $500 million addition to Hearst building at Eighth Avenue and W. 57th.

Wow! that are really good news! I hope that now that building is under contruction Foster starts designing the new tower of Repsol-YPF for Madrid Arena!:D

Well tell them to chop chop! NYC needs to get going with its redevelopment and renewed growth...

New rendering at night:

http://www.fosterandpartners.com/internetsite/images/News/102/8th_ave.jpg

Foster seems to be into a triangles and diamonds / in and out phase. Its very reminiscent of his WTC proposal although better proportioned and more refined IMO.

Well, that project was designed before the WTC, I remember it from a foster's book that I bought on early 2001.
He has also designed a couple of non-linil tower, with round shapes.

<table cellpadding=4 cellspacing=0 width=98% class="quoteBox">
<td align=left valign=center> <smallfont> <b>Quote</B> <I>originally posted by renell </i></b> </smallfont> </td>
<tr><td align=left valign=top>the base doesn't really fit the building imo.. but the building alone looks cool</td></tr>
</table>

You mean the building doesn't fit the base.

I agree. It's cool looking, but once again Foster shows no concern for the building's surroundings.

I agree that the tower doesn't fit the base, but I disagree that it makes the tower look bad.

I think it's somewhat of a novelty.....imagine it, you walk round the corner and see just another Manhatten street with art-deco buildings.....you look to your right......another art-deco building.......you look up......a towering glass skyscraper. I think it will look rather superb.


BTW, isn't there a very similar one being built somewhere in China??

Mods, please move this to the New York City section.

Interesting project...the new tower somehow doesn't thrill me...but it's interesting looking...it's Mnahattan, so it can absorb anything like that.

The old building is great too.

I'm just wondering how many office buildings have been fast-tracked to take advantage of the loss of so many sq feet of space from 9/11 ?

By the time the new WTC site is developed, maybe other developers may have put their buildings up faster, and the demand will not be there for the new WTC buildings?

Just a thought.




KGB

Nice building i love it

Originally posted by KGB

By the time the new WTC site is developed, maybe other developers may have put their buildings up faster, and the demand will not be there for the new WTC buildings?

Just a thought.



Yes, other areas around the city could absorb some of the lost office space, but there was 10 million square feet of office space on the WTC site before 9/11, that's pretty hard to fill up, so demand will still be needed at the WTC site.

I like it!

Construction has started!

Picture from Wired NY

http://www.wirednewyork.com/real_estate/hearst_magazine_building/images/hearst_magazine_eighth_19july03.jpg

wohoo! :cheers:

Foster's tower looks like it might be quite nice for a glass and steel box - well, that description might be unfair, since the diamonds move it "beyond the box," - but on top of that Art Deco base, it is just *OUT * OF * CONTEXT...He should have provided some gradual transformation between styles, as Pelli gradually shifts the facades from stone to glass in his World Finance Center buildings.

I think the concept that Foster was going for in a way was a jewel set in a traditional and ornate piece of jewellery.

In a way, I think that the base is such a strong style on its own that it would be fairly impossible to only "sort of" match it without it turning out a mess. The tower would need to either mimic it completely or be radically different. Foster chose the latter.

The proposal looks amazing. NY needs more of such buildings IMO to balance all that old mass.

I really am pleased with the angles Sir Foster introduces into his modern designs. This building has a new aura to it.

U P D A T E:

Showing Steel
New Hearst Building to Use Innovative Steel Frame

The Hearst Corp., which has long played a role in American society, will now impact the New York City skyline with a $500 million, 42-story steel and glass tower at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street.

The Hearst story started in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire brought into being the splashy daily tabloid in American journalism. The Hearst chain of newspapers, at one point read by one in four Americans, played a major role in stirring up support for the Spanish American War in 1898.

Today, Hearst owns only 12 daily papers, but it has become the largest publisher of monthly magazines in the world. Among its better known titles are Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, both of which it has published for nearly a century, and the more recent O, The Oprah Magazine.

Hearst’s King Features Syndicate distributes some of the country’s most popular comic strips, including "Popeye," "Blondie" and "The Family Circus," along with advice columnists Dr. Joyce Brothers and Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Hearst owns 27 broadcast television stations that reach 17.5 percent of U.S. households, along with a number of popular cable networks including A&E, ESPN, Lifetime and the History Channel.

Still on the Corner

The new 856,000-sq.-ft. tower, when completed in 2006, will serve as the corporation’s world headquarters. The building at 959 Eighth Ave. has been designed by Lord Norman Foster of Foster and Partners in London, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect whose body of work includes renovation of the British Museum and the reconstruction of the Reichstag in Berlin. This is his first building in New York.

Foster’s design preserves the six-story façade of the landmark Hearst-owned building that now stands on the corner. From its hollowed-out core will rise a geodesic-like office tower featuring triangular steel bracing from the 10th floor up. It will have no vertical columns around the perimeter, creating corner views that are not possible in a typically framed building.

The steel framework will be a visible both inside the building and on the street. Referred to as the "diagrid" (a contraction of "diagonal grid") by those involved in the project, this perimeter will consist of 4-story-tall, grade-65 steel triangles prefabricated by the Cives Steel Co. at two plants, one in Gouverneur, N.Y., and the other in Winchester, Va. Cornell and Co. of Woodbury, N.J. will be the erector.

"Our buildings are designed to show how they’re put together," said Mike Jelliffe, project director for Foster and Partners. "We use steel because it’s a lot more flexible. Concrete has its place; we have done many concrete buildings as well. But in the environment of New York, steel is the obvious choice."

The Decision

Building its new headquarters at the site of its original New York headquarters was also an obvious choice. Hearst, which currently has 1,800 employees spread out in nine separate buildings in Midtown, had long ago outgrown its real estate.

"As leases were turning over we were reviewing several different options, which included renewing leases where we were, buying another property or developing one of several sites that we own, including 959 Eighth Ave.," said Brian Schwagerl, senior manager of facilities planning for Hearst. The Eighth Avenue site had several advantages, including its location on top of the Columbus Circle subway station, its proximity to Central Park just two blocks away, considerable air rights—and its history.

The old building was designed specifically for Hearst in 1927 by Joseph Urban and George B. Post & Sons. The original plan had been to eventually add 12 more stories to the base building. On the roof of the old building you can still see the stub-outs of the columns that were designed to carry the additional load.

The Depression intervened, and the additional stories were never built. In the meantime, the squat six-story building was designated a historic landmark. Four years ago Hearst asked Tishman Speyer Properties to do an analysis of the possibility of building on the site.

"We did a feasibility study, put together design and approval teams and oversaw the approval process," said Bruce Phillips, senior director of design and construction for Tishman Speyer.

Since the building had been landmarked, building on the site required approval from the Landmarks Commission, which allowed construction of the new building on the condition that the original façade be preserved. Because it is situated above the subway, the project also had to go through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure. In the end, in exchange for improvements to the subway station—including a new entrance, installing three elevators, repositioning turnstiles and adding and moving stairwells—Hearst was given a bonus of six floors to add onto the tower.

Phillips and his crew gave Hearst a list of possible architects. "Foster’s work on the Reichstag and the British Museum where he brought the old and new together attracted us," Schwagerl said.

Tishman Speyer has stayed on as development manager and will oversee the project until completion. The Cantor Seinuk Group Inc. quickly joined the team as structural engineer and Flack and Kurtz Inc. as mechanical engineer. Turner Construction Corp. is the construction manager.

The Diagrid

The unusual design of the building’s exoskeleton has meant a close working relationship between Foster’s team and structural engineer Ahmad Rahimian, executive vice president at Cantor Seinuk.

"Working with Cantor Seinuk, we developed this triangulated concept, this diagonal grid that breaks up the sides," Jelliffe said. "It’s a three-bay elevation to the east side and a four-bay elevation on the north and south sides. At the corners (because there are no vertical columns) we had the opportunity to create something special.

"We cut back the diagrid to form what we term the ‘birds’ mouths.’ They open up most of the floors and allow a much more panoramic view. So when you’re standing on those floor plates you’re not looking into corners, you’re looking into chamfers which open up the view."

Triangular bracing on the perimeter of a skyscraper is not new. It has been done before, most notably for the John Hancock Building in Chicago.

"What’s unique about this is that there is no column, no vertical element on the perimeter; it’s all triangulated," said Rahimian. "The triangular frames carry the gravity load. At the same time, the triangulation has inherent strength and resistance to the lateral loads, seismic and wind. …The triangulated shape means you don’t need any additional bracing and you don’t need to have any concrete walls in the building."

Because the triangles are so efficient in terms of bearing both the gravity and lateral loads, the building will use 21 percent less steel tonnage than a conventional building of its size.

The diagrid also allows for larger open floor plates, which Hearst considers important. Schwagerl said some of the older buildings in the neighborhood are beautiful, but "inside they not very helpful to us as we put out our magazines. These 22,000-sq.-ft. floor plates are designed to give us the open space we want."

The Old and the New

The diagrid begins at the 10th floor. From 10 down the building rests on raking mega-columns that allow for vast open spaces for the lobby, a cafeteria, meeting rooms and other public spaces.

"The tower loads are collected in a few locations with the mega-columns coming all the way down from the 10th floor to the foundation," Rahimian said.

None of the structural elements of the old building will remain; the new building will have its own foundation and new columns. Only the framing at the perimeter of the old building will remain to stabilize the existing landmark façade, and even that is being upgraded to meet current wind and seismic criteria.

"From the bottom to the 10th floor is one structure and from the 10th floor up, it’s framed entirely differently," said Ted Totten, president and general manager of Cives Steel Co.

"Considerable steel work will be required to reinforce the historic façade. The mega-column/mega-brace system up to the 10th floor consists of 44-in. square plate box weldments. Then from the 10th floor to the 42nd, the building changes to an exposed exterior diagrid column system. The wide flange diagonal columns and 10-in. plate connection nodes will require special fabrication and erection skills to interface the steel frame with the curtain wall system.," he added. "We will be field assembling the diagrid system in 4-story A frames, with the intermediate beams preinstalled to the columns, which will then be set in one piece."

"You enter through the existing arch (on Eighth Avenue) that is part of the landmark element and will be left well enough alone," said Jelliffe. "Then it opens up and you immediately see three escalators in front of you which take you up to the third floor level. Those escalators are set into a sloping water sculpture, which will cascade down past you as you’re going up."

The third to the seventh floors will be an atrium divided into different areas for different uses and enclosed in a skylight. "When you’re sitting in the cafeteria, you can look up through the skylight and see the tower soaring above on one side and you can see the existing landmark wall on the other," Jelliffe said.

Green and Secure

In addition to its innovative architectural and structural features, the new Hearst Building is being constructed with an eye toward attaining LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

"The efficiency of the steel frame of the building, which will resist wind and lateral forces with less tonnage, is an innovation worthy of note within the LEED system," Phillips said. "We’ve also developed some energy-efficient HVAC systems. For example, to heat and cool the giant atrium space we will be using spill air from the tower. That will allow us to provide most of the a.c. and heat from so-called waste air." In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Foster made some changes. The building’s core, rather than being in the center, has been positioned at the west side of the building away from any possible assaults from the street. (This offset core also allows for a larger footprint and more open space on the east side of the building.)

In addition, concrete block will be used to contain the stairways, which will be wider than in most pre-Sept. 11-office buildings.

Demolition of the old building began in May. The foundation work is scheduled to begin in October. Totten said the steel will start rising in February and should take about a year to complete.

"We spent the last hundred years on this corner; we hope to spend the next hundred, and beyond, here," Schwagerl said. "We are creating a building that will support the company through the next century."

DEVELOPMENT TEAM
Owner/Developer: The Hearst Corp., New York
Design Architect: Foster and Partners, London, U.K.
Production Architect: Adamson
Associates Architects, Mississauga, Ontario
Development Manger: Tishman Speyer Properties, New York
Construction Manager: Turner
Construction Corp., New York
Structural Engineer: The Cantor Seinuk Group Inc., New York
Mechanical Engineer: Flack + Kurtz Inc., New York
Steel Fabricator: Cives Steel Co., Gouverneur, N.Y.
Steel Erector: Cornell and Co., Woodbury, N.J.

From skyscrapers.com:

http://www.emporis.co.uk/files/transfer/6/2003/11/230350.jpg

The 6 story base is vacant and construcion has gone underway!

They have a new website with some new renderings, contruction pics, and a cool virtual tour.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower

Thanks for the site JM!

Here are some of the newer renderings:

http://home.1asphost.com/savethewtc/hearst.jpg

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/artist/render3.jpg

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image2.jpg

Hmmm...I didn't see from previous pics that they'd have a stone extension rising up from the base along with the glass & steel....If that's done right, that could really help pull the tower and base together, and make the whole much more harmonious...

Wow, it will look really cool!

Originally posted by Liz L

Hmmm...I didn't see from previous pics that they'd have a stone extension rising up from the base along with the glass & steel....If that's done right, that could really help pull the tower and base together, and make the whole much more harmonious...
:yes:

December 21, 2003

NY Times

A Tower Designed to Be Environmentally Friendly

By JOHN HOLUSHA

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/12/18/realestate/21commprop-184.jpg

Brian Schwagerl, senior facilities manager, with a model of the Hearst Corporation headquarters building at Eighth Avenue and 56th Street.

THE new Hearst Corporation headquarters building at Eighth Avenue and 56th Street will be an architectural standout, with a 42-story stainless steel and glass tower designed by Norman Foster rising from the interior of the six-story masonry structure the company has occupied since 1928.

The building is also being designed and equipped to be energy efficient, to minimize waste and to provide a bright, attractive interior environment for the 1,800 employees who will work there.

Such an approach is considered green, or environmentally friendly, because it reduces the consumption of resources while holding down pollution added to land, air and water.

Indeed, executives of the privately held corporation, say they will be seeking the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design award from the United States Green Buildings Council, a nonprofit association of designers, builders and consultants pressing for environmentally thoughtful development.

No building in New York City has ever won the award, although several upstate projects have been designated. Because Hearst will own and occupy the building, both the exterior and interior will be rated according to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design criteria, more commonly known as the LEED standards.

Another new Manhattan building, 7 World Trade Center, is expected to seek the LEED award under a different set of standards, the organization's new core and shell criteria, according to Ashok Gupta, an official of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group. This is because developers of multitenant buildings build only the inner core and outer shell of their structures, with the tenants controlling the layout and finishing work of their own spaces.

The new criteria could allow Silverstein Properties, which is building the replacement for one of those destroyed in the Sept. 11 attack, to seek the award for its own efforts, regardless of tenant decisions.

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program is an important effort in the right direction, said Mr. Gupta, who is director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's air and energy program. "LEED is a good test; it's really the only one out there," he said. "It has become a national standard."

But because it was designed with suburban projects in mind, with points awarded for installing bicycle racks and having grass growing on the roof, it has been difficult for skyscrapers in urban locations like Manhattan to qualify. "It is harder for urban buildings to score points," Mr. Gupta said.

The approach at the Hearst tower appears to be a combination of common sense, careful attention to how office buildings actually operate, canny shopping and some innovative design. Whether it will meet the green building criteria cannot be determined until the 850,000-square-foot, $500 million tower is completed in June 2006.

But with officials of both the developer, Tishman Speyer Properties, and one of its consulting engineers, Flack & Kurtz, on the board of the Green Buildings Council, it will not lack for advice.

PART of the common sense part of the approach is to ban the use of materials, coatings and adhesives that emit volatile organic compounds — known as V.O.C.'s — a family of chemicals that may include some that are health hazards. "We won't have a new building smell," said Brian Schwagerl, senior facilities manager with Hearst. "We will have zero V.O.C.'s.

Another is recycling, which reduces the amount of waste to be disposed of and reduces the amount of virgin materials that need to be grown or mined to develop new products.

Although the new tower was developed conceptually as an extension of the tower originally designed to eventually be built on top of the old structure, in fact the existing building has been gutted to its landmarked walls. In recent weeks, excavation machines have been pounding at the hard Manhattan bedrock to prepare a foundation for the new building.

According to Mr. Schwagerl, about 85 percent of the demolished material has been recycled in one way or another. The steel for the new structure will be 20 percent lighter than that in a typical Manhattan office building because of the structural design and will contain at least 90 percent recycled content.

(Since virtually all the structural steel produced in the United States comes from mills that use scrap steel as a raw material, project managers would have been hard pressed to find beams and columns made from iron ore.)

One of the distinctive features of the building will be a grand three-story atrium, with escalators taking visitors, who will come through the existing entrance on Eighth Avenue, upward under a skylight. The escalators will be set amid a stepped wall with water flowing downward as the people rise.[b]

Regulating the temperature of such a large space would normally require huge volumes of chilled air and big refrigeration units to produce it.

Engineers working on the project have devised some other solutions. For one thing, all the glass in the building will have a coating that tends to admit visible light while reflecting a large part of the invisible solar radiation that causes heat.

The floor of the atrium will be fitted with pipes that contain chilled liquid that will absorb the heat rays that do enter, before they can be reflected back into the air.

"The entrance opens into a 70- to 80-foot-high space with a skylight," said Asif Syed, a senior vice president of Flack & Kurtz. "That volume of space would consume a lot of energy with conventional air-conditioning." Because of the tubes, which can carry heated or chilled fluid depending on the season, the floor becomes a radiant surface either emitting heat or absorbing it, without the need for conventional air-conditioning units and ductwork. This approach has been used in Europe to cool large spaces, Mr. Syed said, but as far as he knows, it is the first time it has been used in Manhattan.

Even the water feature surrounding the escalators is being pressed into service to help control the temperature in the entry space. "The water feature is there for architectural reasons, but we can use it by chilling the water flowing over it," Mr. Syed said. "If we want an ambient temperature of 75 degrees, we will cool the water to 65 degrees so that the water feature becomes a radiant chilling source as well."

In the upper floors of the building, high efficiency air-conditioning equipment will be used, with sensors and variable speed blowers designed to adjust the volumes of air according to actual need, rather than at a preset level. The chilling units will use none of the chemicals that have partially depleted the earth's protective ozone layer in the atmosphere.

"We have a system that will respond to the needs of the building," Mr. Syed said. "At lunchtime, when people leave and are not running their computers and generating heat, the sensors will detect this and adjust the system."

LIGHT and motion sensors are to be installed as well, to turn off lights when people are absent or when there is enough natural light coming the glass outer wall that artificial lighting is not needed. "In closed offices we will use a motion sensor, and in open spaces, a light sensor," he said. "There will be a great deal of natural light, but people just do not turn off their lights, even when they do not need them."

A grass roof may not be practical in Manhattan, but the roof on the Hearst tower will be put to use to collect rainwater. This is expected to result in a 25 percent reduction in the amount of water that will be dumped into the city's sewage system during rainfalls, compared with a similar conventional building.

The rainwater will be stored and used to replace water lost to evaporation in the office air-conditioning system. It will also be fed into a special pumping system to irrigate interior plantings and street trees. The captured rain is expected to account for about 50 percent of the tower's irrigation needs.

good to see this baby under construction over there. I really like the design and I think the transformation between old and new will be ok. :)

Awsome building.


Can I get an update? :D

You know, the more I read about it and see it, the more it grows on me.

Construction images from the Hearst Corp website:

March:

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image38.jpg
March 4, 2004: Panorama view of Tower job site from the northwest.

February:

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image37.jpg
February 11, 2004: Looking down at the Hearst site.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image36.jpg
February 5, 2004: Esquire and Harper's BAZAAR covers grace the Hearst Tower Project site.

wow cool pix of the construction site there! :cool: :)

very exciting! this is a great project for Foster & NYC!!

:eat: :cheers: :angel1:

More recent ones...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image40.jpg
March 15, 2004: Workers continue fitting steel together.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image39.jpg
March 15, 2004: Steel being put into place.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image42.jpg
March 30, 2004: View from the floor of The Hearst Tower site.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image41.jpg
March 30, 2004: Panoramic photograph taken from the fourth floor of The Hearst Tower site.

Its exciting to see the actual construction progress :yes:

Updates...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image43.jpg
April 20, 2004: Panoramic shot showing the floor progress at The Hearst Tower site.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image44.jpg
April 20, 2004: Workers prepare conduit at The Hearst Tower site.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image45.jpg
April 24, 2004: Steel truss is erected at The Hearst Tower site.

Went by the site the other day, couldn't see much but here's the pic anyway. Taken on 4/30.

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/500/24042004_0430Image0024.JPG

The sight of that crane is something positive, as is the rendering on the signboard:)

Posted by Stern:

High resolution rendering:

http://www.permasteelisausa.com/image/exteriors/Hearst2.jpg

Lobby interior:

http://www.permasteelisausa.com/image/exteriors/Hearst1.jpg

http://www.permasteelisausa.com/image/exteriors/Hearst3.jpg

What a lobby!! :omg: Cool!

Nice looking building. This and the NY Times tower are my 2 most favorite projects so far in NY. I think we could always use more modern-looking skyscrapers to keep up with places like Hong Kong. :D

That lobby is :eek2:

Glad to see it's finally underway!

Found these at skyscrapers.com, dated 5/18:

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/500/2404hearst518.jpg

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/500/2404hearst5182.jpg

well, it seems to be rising inside. :)

It is great to see the construction progress shots. I think that this project will be a one of a kind NY building when it is completed. It will have a historic base with a very unique tower on top.

Updates from the tower's site:

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image51.jpg
June 3, 2004: 17-ton super column being erected at the Hearst Tower site.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image52.jpg
June 3, 2004: Crane positions super column at the Hearst Towr site.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image53.jpg
June 4, 2004: Super column positioned into place.

Oh my, that looks horrible!

Here's some shots taken 6/29, sorry for the quality/coloring.

Construction crane at the Hearst Magazine Tower site...

http://images.fotopic.net/?id=5569650&outx=600&noresize=1&nostamp=1

Steel beginning to rise at the site...

http://images.fotopic.net/?id=5569653&outx=600&noresize=1&nostamp=1

What is taking so long for this building to RISE?? 7 WTC is amazing me by how fast it's growing, while this is driving me CRAZY!

well, it is supposed to take untill 2006. hopefully it will speed up and finish earlier than that, but i doubt it.

I think the construction is pretty difficult so that takes time! :)

It's very difficult, as opposed to the new 7 WTC, this tower has to be built with extremel care since it's being built atop the existing 6 story landmark base.

Some updates from the Hearst site...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image54.jpg
June 28, 2004: Elevation floors 10, 11, and 12 looking Northwest

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image55.jpg
June 30, 2004: Diagrid construction begins at The Hearst Tower project site.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image56.jpg
July 15, 2004: Node is fastened.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image57.jpg
July 15, 2004: Workers prepare 14th floor node.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image58.jpg
July 16, 2004: “Y nodes” installed as The Hearst Tower project reaches an early milestone.

Wow this tower rocks, even more so seeing it UNDER CONSTRUCTION!! SO COOL!!! :okay: I wonder how high it will be in October! :)

Wauw, I see some big improvement going on! It will be great when finished!!!

Wow, haven't checked this thread in a while, but it's great to see progress actually being made on it.

It's gonna look real good, I always loved that glass. :D

From skyscrapers.com:

http://www.emporis.co.uk/files/transfer/6/2003/11/230350.jpg

The 6 story base is vacant and construcion has gone underway!
You know what I'm gonna say...
Thanks!

Found these at skyscrapers.com, dated 5/18:

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/500/2404hearst518.jpg

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/500/2404hearst5182.jpg
You know what I'm gonna say... :)

oh god, im so glad to finally see it rising above the boarding!

so am I :)

Some progress:

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image59.jpg
August 10, 2004: Concrete being poured on the 10th floor.

Posted in the world forums:

2 more construction pics of Hearst Tower.

22nd August '04

http://www.pbase.com/image/32882685.jpg

From Columbus Circle:

http://www.pbase.com/image/32882920.jpg

Update...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image62.jpg
August 23, 2004 -- View of atrium space.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image61.jpg
August 23, 2004 -- Floors 16, 17 and 18, looking northeast.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image60.jpg
August 23, 2004 -- Aerial view of The Hearst Tower project.

I think it will be a great addition to the skyline of New York City.

This is going to be one of my new 10 all time faves!!!! :eek:

its rising pretty fast I think!! This is one location that I will visit in a few weeks no doubt about that! So in 2nd week of October you will see pics by me of this kick ass tower! :) :cool:

wow very cool tower, very nice to see it under construction :)

Is my favourite tower U/C out of spain, in spain there are a project similar:

http://www.telefonica.net/web2/psycotrop2/Tenerife_SkylineFuturo1.jpg
http://www.telefonica.net/web2/psycotrop2/Tenerife_SkylineFuturo2.jpg

:D

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image63.jpg
September 17, 2004: The Hearst Tower, view from 8th Avenue.

Interesting read...

NY Times

Hearst Tower Echoes Trade Center Plan

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2004/10/07/nyregion/blocks.184.1.jpg
Norman Foster, the architect, touring the Hearst Tower, a 42-story headquarters building that will feature a quiltwork diagonal grid.

By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: October 7, 2004

OF the nine might-have-beens from the 2002 design study for the new World Trade Center, one is actually taking form in microcosm. It isn't by Daniel Libeskind. And it's nowhere near ground zero.

Instead, what has begun to claim an angular place in the sky is Norman Foster's Hearst Tower, near Columbus Circle.

With its bold introduction of a quiltwork diagonal grid, or diagrid, into the relentlessly right-angled cityscape, the future headquarters of the Hearst Corporation gives some sense of what New York might have experienced in Lord Foster's proposal for the trade center site.

The case should not be overstated. The two designs differ in important respects, beginning with their massing and scale. The Hearst Tower is a single building, rising 597 feet from the hollowed-out shell of a six-story landmark structure. The trade center proposal called for two towers, joined at three points, rising 1,764 feet.

(Come to think of it, perhaps that was the strategic error made by Lord Foster in his trade center design. It may have been 12 feet too short for the liking of state officials, who were captivated by the symbolism of Mr. Libeskind's 1,776-foot proposal.)

Nonetheless, the emergence of the steel framework of the Hearst Tower, now roughly 270 feet above the sidewalk on Eighth Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets, offers New Yorkers their first full-scale taste of one of Lord Foster's diagrids.

More disorienting than any other feature of the Hearst Tower are its crimped corners. They will slope inward at 75 degrees for four stories, then outward at 105 degrees for four stories, then inward, then outward, inward, outward, inward, outward, inward.

"Once you have a diagrid, there's no reason to have a vertical column on the corner," said Brandon Haw, a senior partner in Foster & Partners of London, which is working on the Hearst Tower with Adamson Associates Architects. Cantor Seinuk is engineering the structure. Flack & Kurtz are the mechanical engineers. Turner Construction is building the 42-story tower, which is to be finished in 2006.

This zigzag profile utterly confounds expectations. After all, even buildings with sloping crowns or curving facades can be pretty much counted on to have straight-edged corners. It simply seems to be in the order of things. Not at the Hearst Tower.

And not in the trade center proposal, either. Starting 224 feet apart on the ground, these buildings would have leaned toward one another, meeting at the 42nd floor; then diverged outward to a distance of 224 feet, joined by a bridge on the 84th floor; then leaned inward again to meet at the 126th-floor summit.

The Hearst Tower zigzag occurs on a much smaller scale. The basic triangle in the diagrid is four stories tall, or 52 feet. And the crimp is meant to play a neighborly role.

"It cuts back and offers more of a view than a vertical slab," Lord Foster said, pointing across a 15-foot-deep crimp toward the adjacent Sheffield apartment tower.

The views from within are also revelatory. Where the corner of the building rakes inward, for example, one can stand as far as 10 feet from the window sill, look down and still see Eighth Avenue almost directly below. (On an ordinary floor, the view would be of carpet tiles.) From inside out, the powerful diagrid becomes a delicate weblike network. Fourteen pairs of slender diagonal columns seem to dance lightly around a perimeter that would normally be a palisade of uprights.

"You wonder how much mass can be carried with such little interruption," Lord Foster said. Indeed, the diagrid uses 21 percent less steel on the exterior than a conventional frame.

Yet, he said, it is a robust structure that offers many alternate paths to carry the weight loads in case of a partial collapse.

THE most surprising facet of the Hearst Tower - and the one most difficult to see from the street - is the atrium that has been created within the shell of the Hearst International Magazine Building, a designated landmark designed by Joseph Urban for William Randolph Hearst.

It opened in 1927 but was never really completed, since Hearst contemplated a tower for which the six-story structure was to be a base.

With the approval of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, Hearst hollowed out the building. The new tower rises from within these old walls, supported on diagonal and upright megacolumns. Its lowest floor doubles as the ceiling of a new 70-foot-high atrium.

The space between the landmark shell and the new skyscraper will be enclosed in glass, creating a vast skylight and clerestory. But the persistence of the old facade around the atrium will create the sense of a town square, Lord Foster said.

Because of security concerns, it is a town square that will not be open to the town - except by invitation or on tours or at special events - although it will be possible for the public to get a glimpse of the atrium from the ground floor.

To judge from the emerging structure, however, the exterior will give New Yorkers plenty to talk about and reason enough to wonder what might have been built downtown. Or, given that Lord Foster is one of Silverstein Properties' prospective architects at the trade center site, what still might be.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/10/06/nyregion/20040704_blocks_lg.gif
Lord Foster’s proposal for World Trade Center site called two towers rising 1,764 feet.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/10/07/nyregion/blocks.184.2.450.jpg
The tower, which is near Columbus Circle, is to be finished in 2006.

Here are some update pictures made by me when I was in NYC. (all pics made on october 5)

http://www.skyscrapers.nl/nyc/hearst_001.jpg

http://www.skyscrapers.nl/nyc/hearst_002.jpg

http://www.skyscrapers.nl/nyc/hearst_003.jpg

http://www.skyscrapers.nl/nyc/hearst_004.jpg

Looking good!

It's gonna be interesting to see how the facade on this one will be and watching the diagrid rise. I wish we could see more of the base in relation to the tower.

Updates from Hearst site...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image65.jpg
October 8, 2004: Inside shot of clerestory panels.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image64.jpg
October 8, 2004: Installation of clerestory panels on SE corner of Tower.

thats looking very very very very transparant! This towers would even rock more if the whole facade will look like that! :)

^It will, all the glass is uniform throughout.

man has it risen fast!

this is so exciting :)

he guys anyone made pics during the meet of this beauty?? :)

Yes, must be pretty tall yet! Hope it's topped out when I'm there. :banana:

he guys anyone made pics during the meet of this beauty?? :)

By the time we got there during the meet, it was dark so the pics I took didn't come out well. I'm sure Dennis, Jan and Ace took shots of it on another day though.

Here's an update from the Hearst website, glass is going up!

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image66.jpg
November 8, 2004: Glass continues to be fitted around the structure.

Thanks! Funny to see how the steel construction comes back in the facade in this tower.

More from the Hearst site, the stainless steel has arrived...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image67.jpg
November 15, 2004: First stainless steel-clad section arrives

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image68.jpg
November 15, 2004: First stainless steel section installed on the southeast corner of the tenth floor

Wow that looks great! :)

yeah! :omg: I do love this tower and it isn't even finished!! :omg: :okay: :cool:

that uberbig truck ws backing up @ the meet. it was... the biggest truck i have ever seen

Great view...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image69.jpg
November 26, 2004: View from the 28th floor of The Hearst Tower

can someone post some recent pictures from central park? I havent seen that angle for ages!

damm thats a nice view from the 28th...

Nice view indeed! Now we want the view from CP to Hearst Tower, someone? :) :cheers:

Great view...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image69.jpg
November 26, 2004: View from the 28th floor of The Hearst Tower

Beautiful, just imagine what it would look like from the 42nd!

And they're saying this one will be done in 2006? Heck, with the way the construction rate seems to be going just by watching this thread, it looks like she's gonna be topped out sometime next spring or summer!

I can't wait to see this finished.

heh...i've been quite skeptical about what this building'll do to the midtown skyline with its rather radical shape. but looks like it's going on well. can't wait till the get more stainless steel on the facade, then we'll get an idea of what this building will be like.

and besides, it's time to get more neighbors for time warner...

Wired New York put up a live webcam with a sweet view of the building:

http://www.wirednewyork.com/webcam2/

Wired New York put up a live webcam with a sweet view of the building:

http://www.wirednewyork.com/webcam2/

Awesome freakin view, now I can watch her go up from over here. Thanks savethewtc. :okay:

Nice pic showing the glass posted by Grimm,NY dated 12/17 at SSP:

http://www.pbase.com/grimm78/image/37597284.jpg

Nice glass!

Update...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image70.jpg
December 23, 2004: The Hearst Tower looking southwest from 57th Street.

i agree. the glass is turning out to be rather similar in looks and color as the new 7 wtc. very nice.

December 29, 2004

http://img134.exs.cx/img134/7866/dscf0090hearsttowerucdec04toth.jpg

Looking south
http://img134.exs.cx/img134/7635/dscf0091hearsttowerucdec04toth.jpg

Some of that pimp steel
http://img134.exs.cx/img134/8015/dscf0092hearsttowerucdec04nort.jpg

http://img134.exs.cx/img134/8764/dscf0093hearsttowerucdec04toth.jpg

http://img134.exs.cx/img134/1595/dscf0094hearsttowerucdec04toth.jpg

Here's some of that truck with the steel or something
http://img134.exs.cx/img134/8365/dscf0095hearsttowerucdec04truc.jpg

http://img134.exs.cx/img134/411/dscf0096hearsttowerucdec04truc.jpg

http://img109.exs.cx/img109/1919/dscf0097hearsttowerucdec04urns.jpg

Some of that old facade
http://img109.exs.cx/img109/3994/dscf0098hearsttowerucdec04oldf.jpg

http://img109.exs.cx/img109/699/dscf0100hearsttowerucdec04truc.jpg

http://img109.exs.cx/img109/9717/dscf0101hearsttowerucdec04truc.jpg

http://img109.exs.cx/img109/7157/dscf0104hearsttowerucdec04truc.jpg

Nice shots. That Construction Elevator is massive.

That will be a good-looking tower! I hope they'll remove all the signs from the base when it's completed.

yes they will. they are only temporary.

nice pics as usual LeCom!

wow...it has grown considerably! :eek:

its arresting profile is already beginning to be felt :cool:

Another update...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image71.jpg
January 5, 2005: Birdsmouth panels installed.

Heres a render of what it may look from across the river in Jersey:

http://www.graffitibiz.com/hearst.jpg (http://www.graffitibiz.com/nyc_full.jpg)
(click on the image for a full panorama)

well update, I guess:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v648/tom3km/2005_0129Image0079.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v648/tom3km/2005_0129Image0080.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v648/tom3km/2005_0129Image0081.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v648/tom3km/2005_0129Image0082.jpg

orgasmic! it keeps getting better and better!

Awesome facade!.

Amazing facade:

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image72.jpg
January 31, 2005: Outrigger on 8th Avenue side of Tower

Posted in world forums:


i took one of this tower two weeks back

http://img237.exs.cx/img237/2513/hear8rs.jpg

its certainly an interesting design

nice!

wow, they must be only 2-4 floors away from topping out now! can't wait till they top this one out and add more stainless steel to the facade of the building.

How high is it currently? One of the best current projects in NYC!

I think it was around 180m...
too small IMO for the location, they needed this one to be above the rest, at least 220m tall, because it feels overshadowed by the massive twins now :(

Found at a site called cornershots and posted at WNY:

http://www.cornershots.com/images/topless.jpg

Oh.. my. That just keeps on looking better and better.

Also. Around 4 or 5 rows of windows up, whats that gap in the facade on the corner?

From Foster and Partners website plus the Daily News had an article about this...

'Topping out' for Foster and Partners designed Hearst Tower, New York

11th February 2005

The Hearst Corporation's 46-storey headquarters office tower was 'topped out' on 11th February in the presence of the Governor of New York State, George E Pataki and New York City Mayor, Michael R Bloomberg. Signifying the placement of the highest steel beam, the structure now rises to its full 597 feet above the existing six-storey Art Deco building. Scheduled for completion in 2006, the tower establishes a creative dialogue between old and new. The new building will provide almost a million square feet of space, enabling one of America's largest publishing companies to consolidate its entire New York City staff in one location and resonating with founder William Randolph Hearst's original vision of a vibrant media hub at Columbus Circle.

The Hearst Corporation's drive to create an improved workplace is articulated by the building's light-filled, environmentally progressive status. Designed to consume significantly less energy than a conventional New York office building, and naturally ventilated for up to 75% of the year, the Hearst Tower is set to become the first commercial office building in New York City to achieve a 'Gold Rating' under the US Green Buildings Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Program.

Lord Foster noted, "The Hearst tower expresses its own time with distinction, yet respects and strengthens the existing six-story historical structure. The tower is lifted clear of its historic base, linked on the outside only by columns and glazing, which are set back from the edges of the site. The transparent connection floods the spaces below with natural light and encourages the impression of the new floating above the old."

The main spatial event is the vast internal plaza - an 'urban room' - that occupies the entire floor plate within the shell of the historic base. Functioning like a bustling town square, this dramatic space provides access to all parts of the building. It incorporates the elevator lobby, the Hearst cafeteria and auditorium and mezzanine levels for meetings and special functions. Linked on the outside by a transparent skirt of glass, which floods the spaces below with natural light, there is the impression of the tower floating weightlessly above the base.

Unlike a conventionally framed structure, the tower has a triangulated form. This is not only a highly efficient solution, using 21% less steel than a traditionally framed building, it is also structurally more resilient; and of the 10,480 tonnes of steel used for the structure, 90% is recycled material. With its corners peeled back between the diagonals, the structure has the effect of emphasising the tower's vertical proportions and creating a distinctive facetted silhouette on the skyline.

For further information please contact: Bud Perrone at Rubenstein Communications

bperrone@rubenstein.com Tel +001 212 843806

i took these today - its really coming together...

http://img60.exs.cx/img60/5821/dsc026029ul.jpg

http://img60.exs.cx/img60/4182/dsc025771id.jpg

http://img60.exs.cx/img60/6581/dsc025763sf.jpg

http://img60.exs.cx/img60/5579/dsc025737lx.jpg

http://img60.exs.cx/img60/4373/dsc025719jf.jpg

http://img60.exs.cx/img60/3250/dsc025703nr.jpg

http://img60.exs.cx/img60/4734/dsc025693me.jpg

when is it supposed to be finished?

well, looks like the roof height of the building has been reached, though there's still 4 more floors to go...

the building should have its steel columns all installed before the end of this month, and the facade cladding should be largely finished by around may, judging by how quickly the glass's rising. the building's not scheduled to be completed in the interior until early 2006.

yeah! keep the stainless steel bracings coming!

Great new updates!

GREAT shots gothamaniac, loving the side angles and the second shot, looking good.

Here's pics from the topping out ceremony:

http://www.fosterandpartners.com/InternetSite/images/news/173/hearst7.jpg

http://www.fosterandpartners.com/InternetSite/images/news/173/hearst5.jpg

http://www.fosterandpartners.com/InternetSite/images/news/173/hearst6.jpg

http://www.fosterandpartners.com/InternetSite/images/news/173/hearst3.jpg

http://www.fosterandpartners.com/InternetSite/images/news/173/hearst8.jpg

http://www.fosterandpartners.com/InternetSite/images/News/173/hearst4.jpg

I actually prefer it with the dark lines rather than the white ones.

I actually prefer it with the dark lines rather than the white ones.


as do i!

Waauw can't wait to visit it! Hopefully next year! :p

Posted in the world forums...

These photos were taken today 02/20/2005

by me, Carlos :)


This is the view from Central Park....

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v109/nyctowers/DSC00025copy.jpg



http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v109/nyctowers/DSC00026copy.jpg


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v109/nyctowers/DSC00014copyhh.jpg


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v109/nyctowers/DSC00015copyll.jpg

Thanks Carlos (and Jack). I love this design, much better then Fosters Swiss RE in London.

The coated glass doesn't look nearly as transparent in the daytime as it did in the architectural renderings.

Two days ago
http://img20.exs.cx/img20/6003/dscf0013hearsttowerucfeb05toth.jpg

http://img20.exs.cx/img20/7541/dscf0014hearsttowerucfeb05lowe.jpg

http://img20.exs.cx/img20/8466/dscf0015hearsttowerucfeb05look.jpg

http://img83.exs.cx/img83/2251/dscf0057shilouettehearsttoweru.jpg

nice shots as usual LeCom ;)

Very nice update LeCom, I love how it's glistening in the sun. The side curvy diamond bracing looks stunning all lit up like that.

Here's an update from the official site...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image74.jpg
February 24, 2005: View of The Hearst Tower from The Gates in Central Park.

Another update...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image75.jpg
March 25, 2004: View of top floor of Hearst Tower.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image76.jpg
March 25, 2004: Progress to date.

On 3/27 from Forgotten NY:

http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/53rdstreet/16.9avold%26new.jpg

Posted in world forums:

here are my photos taken today 04/10/2005

all photos by me Carlos


Old meets New

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v109/nyctowers/ht2.jpg


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v109/nyctowers/ht1.jpg


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v109/nyctowers/ht3.jpg


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v109/nyctowers/ht8.jpg


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v109/nyctowers/ht5.jpg


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v109/nyctowers/ht6.jpg

OH MY GOD ITS LOOKING SO BEAUTIFUL!
GORGEOUS!
FANTASTIC!

Took this one today on 4/11, came out bad but I'll post anyway:

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/3220/24042005_0411Image0056.JPG

the building certainly has a distinctive look, but it looks a little awkward to me. Don't know what to think about it.

But i was wondering how they take the old buildings down in Manhattan. They just pack the building with explosives and let it implode?

well in this case, it was a fairly small building, 4 stories at max... and what they did was just empty it, I noticed it one through an open fence, they had just left the facade standing, and built within.
well that's what I remember, and I haven't looked in it over a year, so if anyone is an expert on construction, he better correct me ;)
otherwise, they pretty much dismantle buildings piece by piece. there's a nice series of photos in the Skyscrapers museum on how they destroyed such a building in the past to allow an even bigger one to be constructed

Another one...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image78.jpg
April 12, 2005: Louvers installed on mechanical floors.

Oh How I just love this building!! This is going instant in the top5 of NYC towers for me!!

I love this tower so much! It definatly makes my top 10.

I got to see that building when I was in the city over break, and I have to say pictures do not do it justice. I was there on a sunny afternoon, and that tower just sparkled. Amazing tower.

this building's turning out way better than i would've ever thought. it's so radically different from typical nyc architecture, but it's blending in somehow....amazing.

gotta love those beaks...

From the world forums...


..moving along further, a crystal forms by the roadside...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v430/lancebloke/Hearst.jpg

Taken 5/2/05...

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/3222/24042005_0502Image0070.JPG

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/3222/24042005_0502Image0071.JPG

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/3222/24042005_0502Image0072.JPG

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/3222/24042005_0502Image0074.JPG

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/3222/24042005_0502Image0075.JPG

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/3222/24042005_0502Image0076.JPG

wow, the building looks fantastic!
is it already topped out?

wow, the building looks fantastic!
is it already topped out?

Yea, it's topped out.

Here's an update...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image79.jpg
April 26, 2005: The second and last crane is lowered by the derek.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image80.jpg
May 11, 2005: Window washing apparatus sits poised to operate on Tower roof.

its shorter than i thought. but its still cool!

Yes, that's my only problem with it, it looks shorter than it actually is :(
But still great addition, Columbus Circle suddenly densified pretty well IMO

I was over in NYC 2 weeks ago and took this of Columbus Circle / Time Warner towers and the Hearst Tower. Its a fantastic design and next to the Swiss Re 'gherkin' in London a great example of Foster and co trying to get away from straightlines and glass boxes.

http://img270.echo.cx/img270/2284/img00342ng.jpg

Update...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image81.jpg
June 17, 2005: The Hearst Tower continues to rise.

whoa jimbo! i also took a pic of hearst and time warner center together practically on the same spot as u did on 6/12. it's almost the same pic, except that the building had more glass on it then. crazy stuff...

Here's an update from yesterday.

Originally posted by pianoman11686 from Wired NY.
http://images.snapfish.com/343%3C89%3A723232%7Ffp63%3Dot%3E234%3A%3D937%3D37%3B%3DXROQDF%3E23238%3C8%3B86962ot1lsi

Found at pbase, dated July 4th...

http://www.pbase.com/terraxplorer/image/45735029/large.jpg

Here's a recent shot I found of the Hearst Tower from the Hudson River.

Originally posted by Edward from Wired NY.
http://www.wirednewyork.com/real_estate/hearst_magazine_building/images/hearst_hudson.jpg

my goodness..it looks close to completion! :eek:

I took these on Saturday (7/9)
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a189/cyberchris78/AX.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a189/cyberchris78/1a.jpg

Nice ones chris; here's my stuff from earlier today

Look who's there...
http://img321.imageshack.us/img321/7894/pict01108thavenuetothenorthloo.jpg

The mightiness
http://img345.imageshack.us/img345/5138/pict0116hearstucjul05tothenort.jpg

The home stretch
http://img345.imageshack.us/img345/5731/pict0117hearstucjul05tothenort.jpg

Look at all the skyscrapers around
http://img345.imageshack.us/img345/4230/pict0118hearstucjul05tothenort.jpg

Mighty
http://img345.imageshack.us/img345/3411/pict0119hearstucjul05southeast.jpg

The base makes it look even more mysterious and mighty, Gotham-style
http://img345.imageshack.us/img345/9066/pict0120hearstucjul05basesmall.jpg

What now, wirednewyork?
http://img345.imageshack.us/img345/8467/pict0121hearstucjul05facadesma.jpg

Wow this photo sucks. Here it looks like some fucking Moon Glorious. In real life it looks plain old glorious.
http://img345.imageshack.us/img345/126/pict0124hearstucjul05lookingup.jpg

Come inside
http://img345.imageshack.us/img345/4364/pict0127hearstucjul05entrances.jpg

And now for the #th time I get almost the same shot as Carlos, accidentally
http://img345.imageshack.us/img345/1542/pict0129hearstucjul05oldfacade.jpg

Reconstruction on some lowrise across the street to the south
http://img345.imageshack.us/img345/8742/pict0130hearstucjul05constrnea.jpg

Great updates guys! Love how the white diamonds are glowing, especially in the first shot of LeCom's post. lol @ the facade close up LeCom.

Thanks for posting the view from Columbus Circle chris, been a while to see it from that angle.

Here's an older update from the official site...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image82.jpg
June 23, 2005: The Hearst Tower from Central Park.

yeah, what now, wirednewyork?! haha

looks like the cladding work's sorta slowing down. hey guys! keep the construction progress coming!

Another...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image83.jpg
July 3, 2005: The Hearst Tower viewed from the Hudson River.

More...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image84.jpg
August 5, 2005 -- One of the last stainless steel V-shaped pieces is lowered to the 40th floor for installation on the southeast corner of The Hearst Tower

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image85.jpg
August 5, 2005: Atrium space nearing completion at South side of The Hearst Tower.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image86.jpg
August 11, 2005: Netting is taken down and façade is cleaned.

September 9, 2005:

http://img391.imageshack.us/img391/1741/hearstlarge4qe.jpg

New York Times
September 18, 2005

An Urban Landmark in Manhattan Grows by 46 Stories

By ANTHONY RAMIREZ

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/09/18/nyregion/18herst.1842.jpg
Minako Yoshino, a professional sculptor, restoring the figures on the Hearst company's headquarters at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/09/18/nyregion/18hearst.1841.jpg
The 46-story glass tower that now tops the original building.

Like the pharaohs, William Randolph Hearst liked big. Gaudy wasn't bad, either. In his eyes, action - boisterous and ambitious - was king. The denouement was best left to others.

So it was in 1926 that Hearst, the newspaper publisher who was the model for "Citizen Kane," turned to the one vision he felt fitting for the International Magazine Building, his new Manhattan headquarters near Columbus Circle.

To no one's surprise, the inspiration was the Ziegfeld Follies. A showcase for showgirls like Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies, it was Las Vegas's untamed forefather. Hearst chose as the architect Joseph Urban, the Follies' principal designer and a Hearst intimate. Urban attacked the project with gusto.

Completed in 1929 at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, the audacious result was early Samson and Delilah. Giant columns jutted up, topped with funerary urns. Statues of square-jawed men in tunics, representing the arts, brooded heroically. And a triumphal arch loomed large enough to welcome Hearst on an elephant.

Now, three-quarters of a century later, comes an equally bold finish. Pedestrians near Columbus Circle have noticed a glittering glass office tower, 46 stories tall - the new Hearst headquarters - rising on top of the six-story, pyramid-tan building and costing a reported $500 million.

Just as provocatively, however, but harder to see behind the scaffolding, are Urban's original ideas, the Hearstian heraldry not only preserved but made pristine.

"This is an homage to Mr. Hearst and Joseph Urban, " said Brian G. Schwagerl, a senior real estate official for the Hearst Corporation.

The complicated edifice has been cleaned and repaired by modern stonemasons and other artisans at a cost of $6 million. Later this month much of the scaffolding will begin to fall away, with the rest to be taken down in stages over the next few months.

The Hearst building had always seemed curiously unfinished, and it was. Urban considered the building a foundation for a grander Hearst tower that was never built.

Hearst, busy with the rest of his empire, did not seem to care. And the Hearst Corporation was content with the cramped, if interesting, office space of the original building until 2003. It was then that that the company began building the glass tower to consolidate its far-flung staff. And as part of the construction, Hearst pledged to restore the old building, whose exterior must be preserved as a landmark under a 1988 city designation.

The job has not been easy. "While we're restoring this historical façade, we're working below it, above it and all around it at the same time," said Thomas Farrell, senior managing director of Tishman Speyer Properties, the new tower's builder.

Wind, rain and the seasons are hard on any building, but especially so on the Hearst building. It was made of a then-experimental material, pre-cast stone, which was cheaper than natural stone and easier to mold, but more vulnerable to cracking, leaching and crumbling.

And the building's exterior, the landmarked portion, is enormous, its 450,000 square feet 10 times the floor area of the main concourse at Grand Central Terminal.

Working simultaneously over all three faces of the facade (the building is shaped like a U, as in Urban), work crews examined hundreds of stones, removing scores of them, some as heavy as 3,500 pounds and about half the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

Positioning a huge replacement stone to fit into a hole with sometimes fractions of an inch of leeway can take all day, said Charles Bowen, a crew foreman with Local 1 of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers. "It's all so you can look from the street and say, 'Wow, it looks pretty,' " he said.

Close-up work is the task of restoration consultants, like Richard Wilson. A high-pressure spray of ground glass scours away decades-old calcium crust, bird droppings and natural decay, "the way your mother would wash a pot," Mr. Wilson said. A mineral coating called kime is applied to consolidate, or strengthen, the cast stone. The eight figures ringing the façade - representing pursuits like Sports, Printing and Sciences - received special attention. A professional sculptor, Minako Yoshino, worked on each statue, touching up eyes and reinforcing arms with kime.

Some figures were frankly puzzling. Asked what one statue represented - with its shield, helmet and serpent at the figure's feet - Ms. Yoshino said: "You tell me! I just don't know!" ( It represents Art.)

With the original building now nearly restored, the question remains: what does it mean, if anything? Hearst left few specifics in the historical record. In an April 24, 1927, telegram, he said he wanted "an account of conspicuous architectural character."

Hearst already owned The New York Journal, which was based at Broadway and 58th Street, part of a real estate portfolio that included much of what is now around Columbus Circle. Louis Pizzitola, author of the book "Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies" (Columbia University Press, 2002), said Hearst saw a grand future for Columbus Circle. "He believed it was going to be the center of publishing and the center of the entertainment business," Mr. Pizzitola said.

Urban died in 1933, six years after the Hearst building was completed. There is no record of Hearst's attendance at the funeral.

And the building itself? Robert Reed Cole, co-author of a 1992 biography, "Joseph Urban: Architecture, Theatre, Opera, Film," said Urban thought of the building as a lark. "Hearst had no sense of humor," Mr. Cole said recently. "So I don't think he got Urban's joke. He was building an imperial palace for an imperial man."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Glasswork is now on the top as it's nearing completion.

Originally posted by TowersNYC in Construction Updates
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v109/nyctowers/uno/DSC00728.jpg

why does the glass on the crown look dull and less transparent compared to those on the rest of the building? imo it sorta dampens its appearance.

What a great tower this is!! :master:

Splendid. Any city would want it.

Update...

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image88.jpg
September 21, 2005: The Hearst Tower looking north.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image89.jpg
September 23, 2005: The Hearst Tower looking west.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image90.jpg
September 28, 2005: The Hearst Tower from Eighth Avenue.

A recent shot from Cornerstone.

http://www.cornershots.com/images/outtamyway.jpg

That is the best shot ever of this tower!!!! I love it!

and again, Talb - it's http://cornerSHOTS.com not cornerstone.

It's mentioned in the sentence even though the name was said wrong, so cut your whinning.

Taken on 10/22/05:

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/3231/24042005_1022Image0036.JPG

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/photopost/data/3231/24042005_1022Image0035.JPG

Guardian:

Taller, higher, bigger, Foster

Norman Foster may be 70, but he shows no sign of flagging. Jonathan Glancey meets the world's most prolific - and ambitious - architect

Monday October 24, 2005

Norman Foster stands on the shoulders of ... well, Norman Foster, really. He is the world's most famous and most productive architect. A giant. From a modest working-class background, he has risen to the highest ranks of professional and social esteem. Knighted and awarded the Order of Merit, he has won many of the world's top architectural and cultural prizes. If he were a military man, his decorations would trip him up as he walked.

Instead, he glides quietly into view in his great modern mill of an office on the south bank of the Thames between Battersea and Albert bridges. Dapper in cord suit, black polo neck and loafers, this keen pilot and skier wears his 70 years lightly. The first thing he wants to talk about is his latest toy, a remote-controlled model aircraft designed to fly indoors. "I've crashed it a few times," he says, "and have just about got the hang of landing it." As well he might: Foster's over-the-shop penthouse may not be as big as his work-in-progress, Terminal 3 of Beijing Capital International Airport, but there is enough space to land a model aircraft.

He's spending more time thinking about the Beijing terminal, though. "It's the largest covered structure ever built," he says. "There are 40,000 workers on site, working eight-hour shifts around the clock. Construction began on April 6 2004 and will be complete on December 31 2007, well in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics."

The roof of the dragon-like structure covers a space 3.25km long by 785m wide. A train will connect various parts of the terminal, along with 175 escalators, 173 lifts and 437 travelators. By 2020, it is estimated, 55 million people will pass through each year.

"To get an idea of the scale," says Foster, "imagine Heathrow terminals 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 together under one roof and then add an extra 17% of floor space. It's so big that in certain lights you can't see one end of building from the other."

Foster has every last detail of this colossus at his fingertips. He loves aircraft; he loves flying. Since his National Service days with the RAF, he has loved the architecture of aircraft hangars, and ways in which the heavyweight art of architecture might learn from the latest lightweight technologies and materials. His Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts in Norwich, completed in 1978, is the most exquisite hangar yet built. Ever since, Foster's architecture has reached for the sky. His ambition and workload, too.

The Victorian architect Augustus Pugin, who worked himself into the grave at 40, once described himself as a "such a locomotive, being always flying about". Foster might describe himself as a jet fighter. He is unable to keep still, and ready to scramble to wherever a new project is rising: Sydney, New York, Malaysia, Kazakhstan. But, where Pugin refused to take on an assistant - "I would kill him in a week" - Foster has some 600 colleagues. His key partners, including Spencer de Grey and David Nelson, have been with him for more than 30 years, working on landmark structures that include Berlin's Reichstag building, the Swiss Re "Gherkin" in London, the Greater London Authority's City Hall, Chep Lak Kok airport in Hong Kong, the Nîmes Médiathèque, the Millau viaduct ... When you are such a global force, does the idea of locale still mean anything? "Wherever we work," Foster says, "we have a presence, whether in site huts or in the offices of engineers or contractors. We are very aware of conditions on the ground."

Yes, but do Foster designs respond to local architectural culture, precedent, history, sense of place? "We take the lead with design," he says emphatically, adding: "If there is an opportunity, without compromise or pastiche, to add something local to a building in such a way that it has a worthwhile impact on the subconscious ..." And then, uncharacteristically for such a precise talker, Foster's thought tails off. He thinks for a second, re-ignites, and tells me, instead, about the structure of the new Beijing terminal. "If I could show you the superb steelwork, the great columns defined by subtle compound curves, I think you would be impressed. These come from the experience the Chinese have in shipbuilding. They are great shipbuilders."

This is Foster in Foster World. He has always wanted to create buildings informed by the structure, logic and beauty of bridges and machinery. One of the first architectural prizes he won was for a working drawing of a windmill. Recently, when I asked him if he had ever been a railway enthusiast, he faxed me a drawing of a Royal Scot 4-6-0 thundering past what I take to be his childhood home in Levenshulme, which backed on to the railway south of Manchester. In designing an ultramodern building for a modernising China, he has no intention of drawing on that country's antique design traditions, but on its young industrial crafts, technologies and engineering processes.

There are some nods to a more venerable culture. "As you pass along the terminal," he says, "the walls and ceilings change from red to yellow, borrowing from traditional Chinese colour schemes." The precedent for the Beijing terminal lies, though, in Foster's earlier work. "It's an extension and development of our previous designs for Chep Lak Kok airport, Hong Kong, and the new terminal at Stansted."

In this sense, too, Foster is much like the design engineers he admires, refining ideas over decades, rather than floundering around in search of fashionable theories. Many of his buildings are exciting, like the curvaceous Surrey headquarters of car-maker McLaren, yet the best have been the result of rigorous design programmes and engineering logic. Less successful are those where form has been allowed to win over intellectual rigour (London's City Hall), or those built for developers as if extruded from a Foster production line, like the Sainsbury's headquarters at London's Holborn Circus.

Foster likes to talk in facts, and about things that excite him. China excites him because of the speed with which it is changing. "It has taken 50 years for Heathrow to grow to its present scale," he says. "In Beijing, the process will have been completed in less than five. Here is a society changing by the power of 10." Which makes the technocrat in Foster impatient. "Take Terminal 5 at Heathrow. The inquiry took longer to reach its inevitable conclusion than the terminal will have taken to build. We waste so much time, money and energy delaying projects, leaving them for the next generation to deal with."

He refuses to bring politics into his business. "I am neither judge nor jury in such matters," is all he will say. He will not comment on the political or business cock-ups that have beset progress on the new Wembley Stadium, another of his designs. "It will be ready, and it will live up to expectations," he says.

Foster does, though, express concern about Britain's lackadaisical attitude to planning. He sits on a Thames Gateway think-tank with, among others, his former fellow post-graduate student at Yale, Richard Rogers, with whom he set up his first practice, Team 4, in 1963.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of developing this stretch of Thamesside flood plains, Foster is aghast at the lack of plans for the infrastructure that makes intelligent and co-ordinated development possible. "Land here is a precious resource, and yet it is squandered."

By way of contrast, he cites his latest work in Italy. "On the edge of Milan, near Linate airport, we're working on the design of Santa Giulia, an extension of the city. There is no sprawl. The site measures 1.8km by 1km. It is connected to the centre of Milan by tram, within 20 minutes, as well as by road and train. A 490-metre colonnaded central boulevard connects all parts of the development. It is not just a housing scheme. Everything is happening at once: school, student hostel, hotels, shops, conference centre, a church by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, as well as housing for 9,000 people. The whole centre, arranged around squares and proper streets, will have much the same layering and density as the Italian towns we all love walking around, while offering parks and breathing spaces, too. The Italians have long known what makes a livable town or city."

Where, though, does Foster go now? And what does he see as his legacy? He pauses - uncharacteristically. He gets up and plays with the silver blind filtering our view of Battersea rooftops. "If I look back to where we started as a practice [as Foster Associates in 1967], one of our concerns was the democratisation of the workplace, the breaking down of blue collar-v-white collar culture, a reinvention of the office. And, then, there's been the reinvention, or rediscovery, of the airport. Beyond these, it's been the connection of architecture with infrastructure; we're not there yet ... and to have seen so many of those who have worked with the practice, like David Chipperfield, Jan Kaplicky, Michael Hopkins, Birkin Haward, Julian Barfield, David Morley, go on to do so well in their own right."

All true, yet nothing like a summary of Foster's extraordinary adventure in architecture. The truth is, his career is still a work-in-progress.

In the works

Some of Foster's current projects:

Supreme Court, Singapore A home for 23 courts and the Academy of Law.

Wembley Stadium, London The world's largest all-covered football stadium, seating 90,000.

Hearst Tower, New York 42-storey corporate HQ.

Palace of Peace, Astana, Kazakhstan 62m-high pyramid, a centre for world faiths including an opera house and a library.

Centrale Station, Florence New underground station for high-speed trains alongside existing 1930s station.

Repsol HQ, Madrid 34-storey office tower.

Jameson Tower, Vancouver Restoration of listed structure with 10-storey mixed-use building and 25-storey residential tower.

Very beautiful tower, especially the base looks amazing!

dOES ANYONE READ TALB ARTICLES?

Some more images...

http://enr.construction.com/features/_gallery/051031/images/051031-04.jpg

http://enr.construction.com/features/_gallery/051031/images/051031-03.jpg

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image91.jpg
October 19, 2005: Hearst Tower at dusk.

Finally it is finished and it looks awesome!

http://enr.ecnext.com/free-scripts/comsite2.pl?page=enr_document&article=febuar051031-1
Manhattan High-Rise Is Chock Full Of Jarring Juxtapositions

Demanding program and architecture push builders to perform above the norm

10/31/2005
By Nadine M. Post

http://enr.construction.com/images2/2005/10/051031-24a.jpghttp://enr.construction.com/images2/2005/10/051031-24b.jpg
Precise. Nodes for the diagrid (left) and megacolumn-superdiagonal connection had extremely tight tolerances.
(Photos courtesy of Cives Steel Co.)

http://enr.construction.com/features/_gallery/051031/images/051031-04.jpghttp://enr.construction.com/features/_gallery/051031/images/051031-03.jpg
Rare. Diagrids, free of vertical elements, are efficient but tough to build. (Graphic courtesy of WSP Cantor Seinuk)

http://enr.construction.com/images2/2005/10/051031-26a.jpg
Exacting Placement. Diagrid erection (above) was slow, but much easier and faster than the base, which included the superdiagonals (right). (Photo above courtesy of Cives Steel Co.)

http://enr.construction.com/images2/2005/10/051031-26b.jpg

http://enr.construction.com/features/_gallery/051031/images/051031-07.jpg
(Rendering courtesy of the Hearst Corporation)

http://enr.construction.com/images2/2005/10/051031-27a.jpghttp://enr.construction.com/images2/2005/10/051031-27b.jpg
Sharp. Curtain-wall panel (above) for base of bird beak included stainless steel cladding as well as glass. (Photo left courtesy of Cives Steel Co.; right courtesy of Permasteelisa Cladding Technologies)

It’s an expanded home for the Hearst Corp. media family, not the Hearst family itself. But the Manhattan job may as well be called Hearst Castle East. The builders of the 46-story office building–a restoration, an adaptive reuse and a modern steel tower rolled into one–are as obsessed with quality and detail as was William Randolph Hearst, when he built his extravagant California estate in the early 1900s.
The Hearst Building leaves no room for error and has "no forgiveness," says Ted Totten, president of Cives Steel Co.’s Northern Division. The fabricator, based in Gouverneur, N.Y., furnished and erected the job’s 12,000 tons of structural steel, under a $38-million contract.

Design architect, Foster & Partners, London, wanted the modern tower to appear to float over the six-story, 1928 landmark–to separate the old and new. This forced the general contractor to "approach the project as two separate entities," says Scott Borland, one of three project managers for Turner Construction Co. The New York City builder holds a $252-million guaranteed-maximum-price contract for the core and shell of the 856,000-sq-ft development.

Even with the demands, at 95% completion of the core and shell, the job is on time and under budget, says Borland. And there are no claims, he adds.

Hearst has gone to extremes to consolidate 2,000 employees from 10 locations, and provide a "nurturing, secure" and sustainably correct environment. The owner expects the office building to be the first in New York City to earn a gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program for sustainability. And after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Hearst beefed up the structure. This included filling "box" megacolumns and superdiagonals with concrete and encasing the steel core in concrete. The curtain wall system also is built to perform better under certain blast conditions.

Work consisted of first gutting the six-story landmark–Hearst’s headquarters since 1928–and then adapting it to function as a hollowed-out lobby-atrium. Concurrently, construction proceeded on the new tower, 160 x 120-ft in plan, that rises from within the 200-ft-square base.

The tower boldly expresses its perimeter structure–a diagonal grid pattern of steel, clad in stainless steel. The tower corners "slice" in and out, creating a stack of eight-story, open-mouth "bird beaks." The main entrance, on the east side, leads into a lobby that will contain an $8-million water feature. Sources say the water feature costs more than the plumbing to cool and dehumidify the entire building.

Slicing through the tall water feature are escalators to a third-floor atrium, an open space with ceilings as high as 80 ft that will contain, among other things, Hearst’s indoor "piazza." The volume of the lobby-atrium is 1.7 million cu ft.

A clerestory wraps the base of the tower, from floor seven to 10, just above the atrium skylight. The core is offset to the west wall, which abuts a high-rise.

The typical office floor, and the "diagrid," begin at the tenth level. The diagrid is a triangulated system of horizontal rows of steel A-frames. It has no vertical members. A rarity, the diagrid interconnects all four faces of the tower, creating a highly efficient tube structure, says Ahmad Rahimian, president of the project’s local structural engineer, WSP Cantor Seinuk.

The intersections, every four stories, of the 57-ft-long legs of the "A"s with horizontal beams form nodes, set on a 40-ft module, that redirect member forces. Architecturally, nodes could not be larger than the cross dimension of the diagrid elements. Gusset plates, though more economical, would have violated the architecture, says the engineer. The architect of record is Adamson Associates, Toronto.

At the "jaw" of each beak, diagrid nodes, typically planar, are three dimensional. To develop the more-complex jaw node, the engineer rejected high-tech methods and built a balsa wood model.

The 10,000-ton diagrid, made of wide flange rolled sections, weighs 20% less than a conventional moment frame, says Rahimian. But its inherent stiffness makes it tougher to build, he adds.

The diagrid transfers loads at the tenth floor into 12, expressed perimeter megacolumns, unbraced for 85 ft. Megacolumns continue to foundations. Eight, 90-ft-long superdiagonals slope in from third-floor megacolumn nodes to column lines at the tenth floor. Superdiagonals carry load and also stabilize the core wall.

A horizontal truss system in the third floor braces the landmark facade, provides diaphragm action for megacolumns and superdiagonals and accommodates the lobby-atrium opening. Tubular steel framing at the seventh floor supports skylight panels and provides lateral bracing for the landmark facade.

On the mechanical side, the building is designed to use 25% less energy than a building that meets minimum requirements of prevailing codes, for a projected savings of 2 million kW hours of electricity per year. Hearst claims the building will reduce stormwater runoff by 30%, through roof rainwater harvesting. The water will be used for landscaping and in cooling tower water makeup. Total water conservation is projected at 1.7 million gallons annually.

The water feature will help cool and dehumidify lobby-atrium air in the summer and humidify the space in winter. "We took an aesthetic feature, and at little cost, integrated it into the mechanical system to maintain comfort and reduce operating costs," says Gary Pomerantz, a senior vice president of the consulting engineer, Flack + Kurtz, New York City.

The lobby-atrium uses radiant heating and cooling, with polyethylene tubing in the topping slab. Office space exhaust air is used to condition the lobby-atrium, which will reclaim energy and minimizes use of outside air.

There was concern about the facade, currently exposed on the interior, and freeze-thaw cycles. To prevent this, the engineer designed a wall-heating system.

For sustainable construction, the team has diverted, to date, 2,419 tons or 84% of waste from landfills, says Hearst. Ventilation systems are protected from...

...dust and materials from moisture damage. The building will be flushed with outside air prior to occupancy in April.

Turner’s Borland calls the base-building work "the first most challenging aspect" of a very challenging job. "The lower six floors account for 40% of the cost of the core and shell," he says.

Workers from LJC Dismantling Corp., Elmont, N.Y., kicked off a 32-month construction schedule in June 2003, with a multistage "surgical" demolition. Crews left the landmark’s perimeter interior bay to help support the facade until new wall framing and third and seventh floor framing were erected.

In March 2004, workers from Cornell & Co., Woodbury, N.J., began steel erection. Thanks to the tight interface between the diagrid and the unitized curtain wall panels, "there was lots of opportunity but no room for error during steel fabrication and erection," says Totten.

It wasn’t just the tower that was demanding. Cives spent months developing skylight frame connections that would satisfy the high design load to resist blast and yet meet aesthetics. In many locations, bolted connections were hidden inside the frame’s steel tubes.

The ends of megacolumns and diagrid columns were milled to less than 1/16 in. Measuring tapes only go down to 1/16 in. "This job was off the charts," says Totten, admitting that it was not profitable.

Connections were developed to allow tenth-floor framing to be perfectly level and at the correct elevation so the diagrid above would interface with the curtain wall. Cives had to mill the diagrid node plates on all sides, instead of two, because a 10-in.-thick plate can actually measure 10 3/4 in. Surveyors frequently checked the x, y, z coordinates for elevation and plumbness, and maintained diagrid nodes to within 1/2 in. of the theoretical.

Cornell broke the building into two sections, one below and the other above the diagrid. "It took four months to get to the tenth floor," says Kevin Ducey, Cornell’s project manager.

The third floor became a platform for construction of megacolumns and superdiagonals. Superdiagonals, too heavy to ship in one piece, were assembled and welded on site. Two cranes picked each one.

The significant challenge at the tenth floor was the installation, on two falsework towers, of the beam supporting the superdiagonals. Compared with the lower levels, the diagrid was like production work, says Ducey. But because it was "very carefully" stick built, it took longer. Cornell built a floor every four days, instead of the more typical three.

Because of the tight interface between the diagrid and the curtain wall, "we ended up buying the steel and the curtain wall roughly at the same time," says Bruce Phillips, manager for Hearst’s local developer, Tishman Speyer. Curtain-wall bidders had to develop conceptual plans.

The curtain-wall supplier provided the window panels and the stainless steel cladding for the diagrid and other expressed framing. Every unitized glass panel is independent to absorb the building’s movement, according to Carlo Eisner de Eisenhof, senior project manager for Permasteelisa Cladding Technologies, Windsor, Conn. Of 3,200 glass panels, 625 are "special." Many of these are in the bird’s beak. Thirty-six of the largest panels, 15 ft tall and 12 ft wide, required a special frame for shipping at an angle.

The curtain-wall system included 600 brackets welded to diagrid steel at Cives’ plant. That reduced the depth of the panel by 4 to 5 in., allowing Permasteelisa to fit one extra panel in each shipping crate.

To make sure brackets were properly located, steel-detailer Mountain Enterprises, Sharpsburg, Md., shared its 3D model with Permasteelisa. "We coordinated so that anchors would not run into bolt heads," says Totten.

For the curtain wall, Permasteelisa did three visual mockups, four performance mockups and a blast test. It ranks the Hearst Building as its second-most difficult job and most expensive, at $126 per sq ft.

For Hearst, which is trying to attract and retain talent at its communications empire, the effort is likely worth the investment.

© 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
All Rights Reserved

WhatISee (http://whatisee.org/) has new photos of the building, sans scaffolding.

WhatISee (http://whatisee.org/) has new photos of the building, sans scaffolding.

Wow...especially that second shot.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/051219crsk_skyline
TRIANGULATION

Norman Foster’s thrilling addition to midtown Manhattan.

by PAUL GOLDBERGER
Issue of 2005-12-19
Posted 2005-12-12

Norman Foster is the Mozart of modernism. He is nimble and prolific, and his buildings are marked by lightness and grace. He works very hard, but his designs don’t show the effort. He brings an air of unnerving aplomb to everything he creates—from skyscrapers to airports, research laboratories to art galleries, chairs to doorknobs. His ability to produce surprising work that doesn’t feel labored must drive his competitors crazy.

Foster, who is English and lives in London, is an artist with the savvy of a corporate consultant. He knows how to convince chief executives that the avant-garde is in their interest. In the nineteen-eighties, he persuaded H.S.B.C., the international bank, to spend nearly a billion dollars to build a tower in Hong Kong; the novel structure, in which five enormous steel modules were stacked on top of one another, was the most innovative skyscraper since the Seagram Building. In 2000, he secured a commission from the Hearst Corporation, the publishing firm, to design its new headquarters, in Manhattan. The gorgeous, gemlike tower, which will officially open in a few months, is Foster’s first big project in America.

In the nineteen-twenties, William Randolph Hearst commissioned Joseph Urban to design his company’s first headquarters: six stories of megalomaniacal pomp on Eighth Avenue between Fifty-sixth and Fifty-seventh Streets. Despite its low height, everything about the yellowish stone structure suggests grandiosity, especially the monumental fluted columns that stretch higher than the building itself, giving it the look of a base for a much taller structure. (Hearst and Urban had planned to add a tower, but they never did.) The Hearst Corporation long ago outgrew this zany palazzo, dispatching most of its employees to rented space nearby. When the company decided to gather its operations under one roof, its executives smartly concluded that Urban’s building was too much fun to give up. Hearst hired Foster to build something on top of it, and in October, 2001, he unveiled a scheme to add forty stories to the original headquarters. It was the first major construction project to be announced in New York after September 11th.

As with all Foster designs, the Hearst tower is sleek, refined, and filled with new technology. It looks nothing like the Jazz Age confection on which it sits. The addition is sheathed in glass and stainless steel—a shiny missile shooting out of Urban’s stone launching pad. The tower’s most prominent feature is the brash geometric pattern of its glass and steel, which the architect calls a “diagrid”: a diagonal grid of supporting trusses, covering the façade with a series of four-story-high triangles. These make up much of the building’s supporting structure, and they do it with impressive economy: the pattern uses twenty per cent less steel than a conventional skyscraper frame would require.

Foster’s brilliance can be seen in the way that he exploits this engineering trick for aesthetic pleasure. The triangles are the playful opposites of the dark Xs that slash the façade of the John Hancock Center, in Chicago. They give the building a jubilantly jagged shape. Foster started with a box, then sliced off the corners and ran triangles up and down the sides, pulling them in and out—a gargantuan exercise in nip and tuck. The result resembles a many-faceted diamond. The corners of the shaft slant in and out as the tower rises, and the whole form shimmers.

Such a scheme could have become a pretentious exercise in structural exhibitionism, but in Foster’s hands it presents the perfect foil for Urban’s building. The design avoids the two most obvious approaches: imitating the style of the base or erecting a neutral glass box. Joseph Urban’s goal in the original Hearst Building was to create a respectable form of flamboyance, and Foster has figured out how to do the same thing with his tower, but in unquestionably modern terms, and without compromising his commitment to structural innovation. Foster is at his best when solving puzzles like this one; unlike most élite architects, he isn’t obsessed with creating his own pure forms. His gift for building a meaningful conversation between new and old architecture became apparent six years ago, with the unveiling of the renovated Reichstag, in Berlin: Foster placed a glass dome atop an ornate nineteenth-century masonry structure, reinterpreting the building’s monumentality in modernist terms. And, in 2000, he enlivened the courtyard of the British Museum with a steel-and-glass canopy that casts a delicate geometric shadow on the floor.

In some ways, the Hearst tower calls to mind a famous unbuilt design from a heyday of modernism: a six-hundred-foot skyscraper in Philadelphia, proposed by Louis Kahn and Anne Tyng in 1957, which would have had a zigzag shape based on a framework of triangular supports. Kahn and Tyng weren’t the only designers to have understood that the triangle is an inherently strong and efficient structural form; Buckminster Fuller and the engineer Robert Le Ricolais made the same claim. Foster’s use of triangles is, in this sense, a borrowed notion. But most of the older schemes had the visual appeal of something made with an Erector set. Foster took the ideas, updated them, and produced not just a real building but an exceptionally elegant one.

Indeed, the Hearst tower is the most beautiful skyscraper to go up in New York since 1967, when Skidmore, Owings & Merrill completed the stunningly serene 140 Broadway, in lower Manhattan. After all the inchoate, collagelike skyscrapers that have been built around Times Square in the past decade, it’s refreshing to see a tall building that clearly emerges from rational thought. Yet the Hearst tower also has a jauntiness that most modern buildings lack. The venerable modernist tradition of allowing a building’s structure to determine its form has often led to pious, heavy-handed architecture. If you believe that there is something noble about a building expressing its structure, you will like the Hearst tower. But if you believe that it is more important for buildings to energize the skyline, you will like the Hearst tower every bit as much.

The pleasure of the Hearst tower doesn’t end with the exterior. It has one of the most dramatic entrances of any tower in New York. You go in through Urban’s original arch—which, along with the rest of the base’s exterior, has been meticulously restored—and up a set of escalators. What comes next is an explosive surprise such as has not been seen in the city since Frank Lloyd Wright led people through a low, tight lobby into the rotunda of the Guggenheim. The escalators deposit you in a vast atrium that contains the upper floors of the old Urban building, which Foster has carved out and roofed over with glass. The inside walls of the old building have been covered with stucco, and you look up at three stories of windows—something one rarely sees, except perhaps in a cathedral—which give the space the feel of an outdoor piazza.

Hearst employees will be able to eat in a café within the atrium, and so will be on a par with their rivals at the Condé Nast Building, in Times Square, which features a sensuous Frank Gehry-designed cafeteria. But the Hearst space isn’t just chic; it’s majestic. The atrium is enhanced by huge, diagonal structural supports for the tower, which slice down into it, and skylights offer thrilling views of the tower rising directly above.

Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to see the Hearst Building in the cityscape. It is blocked on the west by a banal brick apartment building, on the north by another apartment tower and, beyond that, by the new Time Warner Center, at Columbus Circle, which looks all the more uninspired in comparison. This situation isn’t much different from that of most iconic New York skyscrapers, which are visible only in pieces. (The Empire State Building is a happy exception.) But the partial sightings of the Hearst Building that are offered up and down Eighth Avenue or along Fifty-seventh Street are so enticing that they end up increasing its allure—like a flash of leg in a slit skirt. The best view comes from the Upper East Side, around the Metropolitan Museum, since nothing blocks the Hearst Building to the northeast. From the Met’s roof, you can see the tower emerge in its full glory, rising over Central Park, at once fitting into New York’s skyline and transforming it.

its awesome to be able to follow this building's construction from the start to the finish. at the beginning, i totally disliked it. but as the building went from image to reality, it got classier and classier with each additional floor of cladding. i got a glimpse of it this summer, and now, i'm loving it, and absolutely cannot wait to see it up close and completed.

http://www.nynewsday.com/entertainment/galleriesandmuseums/am-hearstowerjan20,0,605364.story
UP, UP AND AWAY

A London architect brings his vision to New York with a Hearst tower that prances toward the sky

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON
STAFF WRITER

January 22, 2006

There was a moment, in the fall of 2001, when executives at the Hearst Corp. thought they might have to relinquish their hopes of erecting a new headquarters. The resurgent World Trade Center site, they worried, would suck up all the available supplies of steel, labor and architectural talent. More than four years later, Ground Zero is still nothing but a noble hole and Hearst has nearly finished its tower, a gorgeously flamboyant ode to pure reason designed by Norman Foster and his London firm.

Skyscrapers can take various routes to the clouds. Setback buildings such as the Empire State climb stepwise. Glass-skinned boxes shoot straight up. At Columbus Circle, the Time Warner Center's twin colossi loom like a glowering pair of thick-necked bodyguards in shiny suits.

Foster has given Manhattan a new kind of verticality: His tower prances toward the sky. Its edges are scalloped and its corner windows tilted. The building is held aloft by triangular braces, so it looks as though an acrobat could shimmy up the slanted beams. This is a show-off skyscraper for a town that could use some architectural chutzpah. Welcome to New York City, Mr. Foster.

Foster and Hearst make a perfect pair. In the 1920s, the Old Man, as employees still refer to the long-dead tycoon William Randolph Hearst, hired architect and theatrical designer Joseph Urban to produce the International Magazine Building on Eighth Avenue at 57th Street. The curtain went up on that six-story extravaganza in 1927.

Its ornate shell is still there, grandly wrapped around the base of the new tower. Ceremonial urns perch atop fluted columns, theatrical masks grin with sinister hilarity, buskers in medieval costume stand in for sculpted saints. Hearst's old headquarters could have been mistaken for a Hollywood fantasy of a media baron's lair, which is essentially what it has become.

Exuberant modernity

Hearst had always meant for Urban's folly to support something bigger and more awesome, but the Depression intervened. That original intent helped persuade the Landmarks Commission to allow the interior to be gutted as long as the blond, cast-concrete skin was freshened up.

The new design evinces little interest in might-have-beens. Brandon Haw, Foster's man in Manhattan, seemed relieved to point out that no drawings ever turned up for whatever high-rise Hearst had envisioned. So the addition turned out as brazenly contemporary in its shiny geometry as Urban's original was in its Art Deco frolic. The two are joined by an exuberant sense of modernity.

Foster has inserted a 10-story, one-room Xanadu of an atrium inside Urban's envelope, outdoing the set designer at his own profession. When it is finished, escalators will rise at a rakish angle, skimming across a skin of water that glides down over glass. The lower half of the monumental space is encased in the original walls and pigeonholed with the original old-fashioned windows. Sunlight plunges down from wraparound skylights, creating an effect reminiscent of a Gothic cathedral or a floodlit Broadway stage. Indoor terraces look down on the covered court like risers. The space almost demands a band.

All this razzmatazz comes as a surprise from Foster, who belongs to the tradition of heroic modernism, and whose designs sometimes have a chilly, overbearing sleekness. His famously lingam-shaped Swiss Re building in London (nicknamed "The Gherkin") pokes up past the skyline, deliberately out of place, a declaration of commercial power and architectural clout.

But London also boasts his spectacular addition to the British Museum, a great glass eggshell that encloses the court and the round yolk of the Reading Room in milky light. It is this respectful but fearless approach to the past, mixed with a showman's instincts, that makes Foster a natural in New York. (Having lost out to Daniel Libeskind for the thankless job of laying out Ground Zero, Foster has been commissioned to design one of the site's proposed office buildings. He is also working on an East Side hotel and a provocative plan for a round Shakespeare theater on Governor's Island.)

According to modernist orthodoxy, architecture should express its structure honestly, which means that passersby ought to be able to tell at a glance what keeps their battles with gravity out of sight. Traditional skyscrapers are built like trees: The floors hang from a hidden central core so that the walls can be made of glass.

Sex and the city

Foster has moved the muscle to the surface, binding the box in a latticework of diamonds. As anyone knows who has ever screwed a cross-brace to the back of an Ikea bookshelf, an arrangement of vertical and horizontal elements will sway, but a triangle will hold firm. Foster came up with a "diagrid," a pattern of diagonal beams and triangular windows that nobody could mistake for mere ornament.

If all this building did were to wear its structure on its sleeve, Manhattan would yawn. But the Hearst tower has flair, and it flirts. Although it stands slightly higher than the Gherkin, it can be hard to spot. It peeks sexily from behind stolid brick apartments, offering glimpses of a glinting diagonal or a steel prism. It is a gigantic leg encased in a silver mesh stocking. It is a buglike palace with an exoskeleton of stainless steel.

Hearst's headquarters will welcome its first employees in April, and senior executives accustomed to dark wood paneling will have to get used to glass cages that offer light and views but no privacy. Most worker bees will sit out in the open, their productivity presumably maximized by plentiful natural light, views of the Hudson and a sense of communal well-being produced by harmonious surroundings. They will compete for the corner cubicles.

What really matters to the company is the chance to affix the Hearst brand to an icon. Hooray for such arrant self-promotion! Architectural vanity built this city. Let a million postcards bloom.

New York Times
January 24, 2006

The Quest

By SUZANNE DeCHILLO

A sheath of stainless steel and glass rises on Eighth Avenue. Pedestrians stop, looking up at the new Hearst Corporation headquarters under construction. British architect Sir Norman Foster designed the new 46-floor-tower that sits atop of the Hearst Magazine Building, which was built in 1928 by Joseph Urban and George B. Post & Sons and was supposed to be the base of a skyscraper, had the Depression not intervened. Sir Foster’s Quest: use glass and aluminum to capture the light of the day.

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Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

What a beauty! One of the best new skyscrapers in NYC!

Here is a shot of the lobby from its website.

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/images/gallery/image94.jpg
December 30, 2005: Lobby entrance.

what a great looking building

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=303987

from scotland.......two counties divided by a common architectural language

The Gutter
March 7, 2006

Hearst Tower Spy Shots!

http://gutter.curbed.com/archives/hearstattic.jpg

A Reader identifying herself only as a construction worker at Norman Foster's Hearst Tower (http://www.curbed.com/archives/2005/12/14/hearst_atrium_how_many_architects_can_he_namedrop.php) sent us the image above, identified only as "top of the house." We're not sure what that means. But we're sure sure that legions of architecture geeks everywhere will thrill at the sight of so much raw ductwork. Norman Foster (http://gutter.curbed.com/archives/2005/11/01/gutterland_police_blotter_filchin_fosters_frogmarch.php)'s raw ductwork! From us to you. An inscrutable and equally Nokiaesque pic of the long-sought (http://www.curbed.com/archives/2005/12/05/hearst_tower_update_there_goes_the_nabe_revisited.php) atrium interior follows. Along with a dusty foretaste of Cathy Black (http://www.medialifemagazine.com/news1999/aug99/news5826.html)'s view.

http://gutter.curbed.com/archives/hearstatrium.jpg

http://gutter.curbed.com/archives/hearstview.jpg

Copyright © 2006 Curbed

^^ Remarkable views from the inside! :okay:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/nyregion/20waterfall.html?pagewanted=all
Because Niagara Wouldn't Fit Inside a Lobby

By GLENN COLLINS
Published: March 20, 2006

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/03/20/nyregion/20water.large1.jpg
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Water should be running by May down the glass cascade that is to be the signature of the new Hearst Tower.

It is as yet unfinished, and still bone-dry. But already, New York's shimmering new three-story, $6.9-million glass waterfall is tantalizingly visible above the plywood construction barriers shielding the lobby of the $500 million Hearst Tower.

The indoor waterfall, in the lobby on Eighth Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets, will be the signature of Midtown's most buzzed-about new skyscraper, the first in Manhattan to be designed by the architect Norman Foster. The 46-story tower of gleaming diagonal glass-and-steel grids soars atop the reconstructed base of the fanciful, palatial 1928 Hearst headquarters building, and has the new address of 300 West 57th Street.

Hearst executives say the primary lesson of the waterfall is not its complex sculptural design, but rather the fact that all of its water will come from rain captured on the building's rooftop, piped to a 14,000-gallon tank in the basement and recycled.

"We wanted to create something that would not look like anything else," said Brian G. Schwagerl, the Hearst project manager for the building. And certainly the 27-foot-tall, 75-foot-wide glass wall — designed to enhance the lobby even when dry — is an alien visitor among Manhattan's modest clutch of public indoor waterfalls.

They include the three-tiered vertical channel of water in the Olympic Tower atrium at 645 Fifth Avenue, between 51st and 52nd Streets, the granite-backed cascade in the Aon Center at 55 East 52nd Street, and the underwater-ish lobby in the W Times Square Hotel at 1567 Broadway, at 47th Street. There, visitors wait for elevators under the glass bottom of a pool that diverts water down transparent walls.

During much of the four years that the Hearst waterfall was being designed, it had an unglamorous working title: "the water feature." But last April, upon seeing a mock-up of the icy-looking glass blocks, Lord Foster named it Ice Falls.

Workers will finish sealing the waterfall's joints by late April, and water will be running in May as the tower's first tenants arrive. The official opening will be in September.

A half-inch surface of water — some 15,000 gallons per hour — will flow down the cascade, built of 50 tons of art glass cast into 580 planks, each four feet long. These planks of clear-white glass were made by an artist in Oakland, Calif., using Tasmanian sand because it has a low iron content, "and it is so water-white it looks like ice," said James Garland of Fluidity Design Consultants Inc., the water expert on the project.

The slope is 38 degrees, "an unusually steep angle that conveys lots of energy," Mr. Garland said, adding, "The task is to remove energy from the cascade at every terrace, yet not starve the life out of it."

Therefore, the glass has been scored with grooves that hold back water flow at each of 52 terraces down the slope. Without such grooves, "the water would be all over the lobby," Mr. Garland said.

Even greater constraints were imposed on the designers. The water source had to be adjustable to prevent "rivering," excess water on the slope. Acoustically it had to be musical, but not too loud. And there could be no splash, spray or flying droplets, since people would be entering and leaving on three escalators traversing the waterfall.

People will flow up and down the waterfall "like the water," said James F. Carpenter, the project consultant on the effects of light, who conceptualized the glass design. Thanks to the wall's varying diurnal reflections of both daylight and artificial illumination, "people will move up into the building through a field of light that is ever changing."

The intelligent, computer-controlled system is divided into six zones, and its 22 control valves, which direct water strength and flow rate, can be adjusted to prevent dry spots. "For us, this construction has the intricacy of a Swiss watch," said Michael Wurzel, a partner at Foster & Partners.

Despite its sophistication, the waterfall "is designed for ease of maintenance," Mr. Garland said. "But I can tell you it will take more work than a swimming pool."

illmatic

Does the lobby really need a waterfall in it?

I think that's very classy!

I agree, The escalators will be flush with the waterfall for an amazing effect of being surrounded by water. :okay:

http://www.nypost.com/realestate/comm/66499.htm
OPRAH TOPS WITH HEARST
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NEW LOOK: Hearst's spacious new tower will have an upper-floor site for Oprah to produce her best-selling magazine.
Photo: AP

April 5, 2006 -- OPRAH is moving into the new Hearst Tower.

Yes, Oprah Winfrey, whose magazine O is published by Hearst, will have a "high-floor" aerie in the opulent new Lord Norman Foster-designed skyscraper.

Her upcoming move, the fabulous atrium with company cafeteria, hidden theater and soon-to-be-flowing water feature, were the talk of the broker launch party yesterday morning.

The asking rent for the two bright and large retail spaces is $300 a foot, and Hearst could have any deal or bank it wants, but sources said its head of real estate Brian Schwagerl, wants the brokers to be creative.

"He told us many of the editors and staff are women who love to shop and are home and design connoisseurs," said one breakfast-goer. Schwagerl declined comment.

nice tower

A few more June 1st Hearst
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pretty much completed. just a few more interior work left to go. the facade looks cool when you look up at it close by, i must say.

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/business/media/05hearst.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all
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Hearst's New Home: Xanadu in Manhattan

By RICHARD SIKLOS
Published: June 5, 2006
Frank A. Bennack Jr., the former chief executive of the Hearst Corporation, was recently touring the resplendent new headquarters the company has erected at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/06/05/business/05hearst.3951.jpgSuzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
Fifty-five years after the death of William Randolph Hearst, the media company he founded is flush with profits and has realized Mr. Hearst's dream of erecting a Midtown skyscraper.

What would William Randolph Hearst, the company's legendary founder, have thought of this glass and steel monolith? he was asked. "He only wanted to own his own land and all the land that joined it," Mr. Bennack replied. Gazing around the lobby, he added: "He would have loved it."

Chances are that the Chief, as Mr. Hearst was known to his minions, would be as pleased with the seemingly flush condition of the empire he left behind on his death 55 years ago. Indeed, the company paid for the gleaming headquarters with $500 million in cash.

Among the media giants, the privately held Hearst has been a famously buttoned-up organization. It is gaining a higher profile at a time when publicly traded companies like Time Warner and the Tribune Company are under mounting pressure from disappointed investors. Now, Hearst's ability to move in any direction it chooses without having to explain itself to Wall Street is looking more like a strategic advantage.

The company has been able to go stealthily about its business of running media assets that include newspapers like The San Francisco Chronicle and The Houston Chronicle; scores of magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Esquire; television stations; investments in cable channels; digital start-ups; and much else. It even publishes Floor Covering Weekly and sells ketchup and grass-fed beef under the Hearst brand from ranches it owns in California.

"Since I became C.E.O. of Hearst, people have said: 'Do you like running a private company?' and I've said 'Yes,' " said Victor F. Ganzi, who succeeded Mr. Bennack in 2002. "Now I say, 'No. I love running a private company.' "

Mr. Hearst might also be surprised by the unexpected and ambitious directions Mr. Ganzi has lately taken the business. In March, for instance, Hearst signaled a move away from traditional media by buying a 20 percent interest in the Fitch Group, which operates the Fitch bond rating service, from its French owner, for $592 million.

A month after the Fitch deal — as if to show the company had not given up on its ink-stained roots — it announced a complex deal with the newspaper publisher William Dean Singleton, which would effectively result in Hearst owning a 20 percent to 30 percent stake in Mr. Singleton's company, the MediaNews Group, at a cost of $263 million.

Typical of the inscrutable Hearst style, both of these recent deals make the company appear to be a passive, patient investor in a larger entity. But Mr. Ganzi revealed in an interview that both arrangements carry rights of refusal and other provisions that would allow Hearst to increase its stake in Fitch and MediaNews (excluding a group of California newspapers it owns) and potentially acquire control of both businesses down the road.

"We are comfortable with our minority stake in all these cases and if it never changes we are comfortable with that," Mr. Ganzi said. In the case of MediaNews, Mr. Singleton, 54, and another investor, Richard Scudder, who is 93, each currently own 45 percent of the group of 55 daily newspapers. "Ultimately, I think there will be opportunities," Mr. Ganzi said. Mr. Singleton did not return calls seeking comment.

It is probably no accident that the new 46-story headquarters, with its geometric form, latest technology and green design elements, stands atop the medieval-style cast-stone husk of a six-story Hearst Magazines office built in the 1920's. The profile-raising new tower, like its occupant, is a melding of newfangled and nostalgic — a throwback to the future.

"As a business, it's a bit of an amalgam," said Richard D. Parsons, the chief executive of Time Warner and a friend of Mr. Ganzi. "They're able to think beyond quarter-to-quarter and my sense is they've been very deliberate and thoughtful about building a business that will be around for a long, long time."

Indeed, only one of the company's main business units, Hearst-Argyle Television, is publicly traded — and, as it happens, it has not been much of an investment in recent years. While acknowledging that his company is not immune to the challenges of the Internet or slowing growth at some businesses, such as newspapers, Mr. Ganzi said the company was loath to sell assets.

Private but Tough

And while the company is assiduously private in nearly every sense of the word, it is not shy. Mr. Ganzi, 59, is known as a tough negotiator who recently took a personal role in tackling disputes with strong-minded media figures like Charles W. Ergen chief executive of EchoStar, which briefly took the Hearst-affiliated Lifetime Television channel off its satellite service, and Frank A. Blethen, a Seattle publisher trying to disentangle a partnership with The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a Hearst newspaper.

Mr. Ganzi, a civic-minded accountant and Harvard-trained lawyer, joined the company as its general counsel in 1990. He was brought up in Queens, and his family has owned half of The Palm chain of steakhouses for close to 80 years. Colleagues say Mr. Ganzi is possessed of a photographic memory, and he speaks in precise rapid-fire bursts.

He agreed to a rare interview, given all the curiosity about the company's new tower, yet he declined to meet in person or to pose for a photo. When asked why, he quickly replied into the telephone: "It's quite simple. Don't take this the wrong way: I've enjoyed talking to you but it doesn't make the Hearst Corporation another dollar."

Mr. Ganzi said Hearst executives did not take their private status for granted, and regularly benchmarked their performance against other publicly traded companies. Despite the company's heritage — dating back to 1887, when young William took over The San Francisco Examiner — Mr. Ganzi said that 85 percent of the company's profits came from businesses that were built, started or acquired in the past 30 years.

Through acquisitions, new publications and the nearly obsessive pursuit of brand extensions, the company says it has increased profits in 13 of the last 14 years, and last year raised net income by 10 percent, to about $850 million on revenue of more than $7 billion. (Hearst declined to share more detailed financial information.) By comparison, in 1951, the year Mr. Hearst died, the company had earnings of around $2.6 million, or $20 million in 2005 dollars.

Hearst has been known mostly for its magazines but, while the company generates nearly 60 percent of its revenue from advertising, magazines are expected to represent only 16 percent of its after-tax cash flow this year. Its 12 newspapers and 28 television stations contribute similar cash-flow numbers. According to the company, Hearst generates nearly half of its cash flow from having invested wisely in cable TV channels alongside the Walt Disney Company.

In fact, much of its business is conducted in a maze of partnerships and investments more typical of European family media dynasties than American media conglomerates. For instance, Hearst publishes Smart Money with Dow Jones, runs a magazine distribution business with its publishing rival Condé Nast, and in cable channels holds 50 percent of Lifetime, one-third of A&E and 20 percent of ESPN.

All three of those cable holdings are close partnerships with Disney, which also uses Hearst to distribute its ESPN Magazine. Hearst-Argyle Television, meanwhile, is the largest operator of affiliates for Disney's ABC network.

In a similar vein, NBC Universal owns another third of the cable channel A&E, and Hearst-Argyle is the second-largest operator of NBC affiliates. NBC Universal also recently acquired the Web site iVillage.com, in which Hearst was a 25 percent shareholder.

The ESPN stake, acquired for around $170 million in 1990, has been especially lucrative. Hearst's investment is now worth as much as $3.5 billion, estimates Laura Martin at Soleil Securities. And Robert A. Iger, Disney's chief executive, says: "In many respects we're joined at the hip. We don't really intersect with any other company in the world the way we do with Hearst."

Hearst's marquee magazine business has long bumped up against the fancier Condé Nast Publications and the Time Inc. juggernaut — both of which outstrip Hearst's stable of 20 magazines in terms of ad pages and revenue in the United States. But Hearst has fought for a place in the top rank of publishers under the direction of Cathleen Black, its magazine president for the last decade.

Print and Online

Most notably, Hearst Magazines has pursued an aggressive international expansion of its titles (Cosmopolitan alone has 56 separate editions) and enjoyed breakout success with O, The Oprah Magazine, a partnership with Oprah Winfrey, started in 2000. But a Lifetime magazine fizzled and other recent lifestyle ventures such as Shop Etc., Quick & Simple and Weekend appear, at first blush, more cautious than revolutionary.

But Ms. Black — a champion of print for whom, it seems, the glass is not half-full but overflowing — said the company was constantly looking at ways to introduce and extend brands. "It's got to be something that parts the waters," she said.

Her current focus is online. IVillage, before being sold, was the exclusive Web home for women's publications at Hearst. Now, the company is hustling to create its own digital sales division and pursuing new Web distribution deals like one Ms. Black announced last month with MSN.

Elsewhere, Hearst's approach to the Internet has been typically idiosyncratic. Rather than running Web businesses, it has made some 35 investments in interactive start-ups that have included Netscape and XM Satellite Radio. Some of the company's recent bets — including the companies Sling Media, Brightcove, USDTV and Current Communications — reflect Mr. Ganzi's interest in capitalizing on new forms of distribution for Hearst's video businesses.

Since a vast majority of Hearst's 20,000 employees are outside New York, magazine staff members will fill most of the new tower's floors. Corporate executives and some other divisions will take what is left. The original magazine building, completed in 1928, was part of a plan the Chief hatched in his heyday — when he owned three New York dailies — for a gigantic media plaza. Indeed, its structure was built to support additional floors. Realizing Mr. Hearst's dream of a Midtown skyscraper has been under study for decades.

In his will, Mr. Hearst left an estate in trust valued at roughly $51 million to his wife, five sons and two charities (around $400 million in today's dollars). One provision of the will was that nonfamily members occupy 8 of the 13 slots on the board of trustees. Another was that the trust would dissolve on the death of the last grandchild living on the day Mr. Hearst died. Mr. Ganzi said actuaries estimated that to be some time around 2045 — too far into the future to affect the company's strategic planning.

The Hearst Heirs

Despite their codified independence, several people close to Hearst said Mr. Ganzi and other executives take pains not to be seen as getting in front of the Hearst heirs who are its shareholders. Today, some 60 descendants of Mr. Hearst's sons are among the owners and "remaindermen" (those who will inherit an interest) of the trust. Many of them meet once a year for a picnic in Northern California where, among other activities, bocce is inexplicably a favorite, said George R. Hearst III, a great-grandson of the founder.

George Hearst III is associate publisher of The Albany Times Union, a Hearst paper, and one of several family members who work in the business. His father, George R. Hearst Jr., the oldest surviving heir, is Hearst's chairman. The February issue of the company's Town & Country magazine was uncharacteristically familial: it featured the model Amanda Hearst posing at San Simeon, her great-grandfather's storied castle, in a cover spread.

While there have been tremors of unrest among family members over the years — not uncommon in wealthy dynasties—George Hearst III said in an interview that the family had been uniformly supportive of the new tower.

While it is not exactly Xanadu, Hearst Tower is certainly a major upgrade for many of the company's rank and file. With its soaring entry and French Balzac limestone lobby floor, the building sets a Four Seasons tone for a magazine business that rivals have viewed as more of a Sheraton.

"I've always felt that that is not fair," Ms. Black said. "What I do believe is fair is we've been a very profit-driven company forever. But there's a big difference between being profit-driven and being cheap."

Regardless, the company's image seems certain to change. The complex, designed by Norman Foster, features a 168-seat theater with top-end acoustics, a shimmering crystal waterfall, and Café 57, a staff commissary clearly intended to vie with Condé Nast's renowned cafeteria. (In a nod to the past, the company has also rebuilt the Good Housekeeping dining room from the former building.)

The building has a gymnasium with fancy Italian equipment, which both supplies and launders workout clothes for employees. "I have to say that it's a lot more luxe than I expected," said David Granger, the editor of Esquire, whose staff is among 700 employees who have moved in as of last week.

Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan and now head of its international editions, said she was delighted to be moving to a corner office with sweeping views on the 37th floor, leaving the fourth-floor space she occupies in Cosmo's current Midtown Manhattan offices. "I exercise after lunch every day on the floor of my office and I don't want to go clear down to the gym," Ms. Gurley Brown said. "But I think, on the 37th floor, if I stay down on the floor, no one is going to see me."

Hearst's executives say the best part is the culture that will emerge from gathering so many of their employees under one roof for the first time. Thus, for Mr. Ganzi, there is no contradiction in a media company whose bosses eschew public attention erecting a gleaming, translucent landmark.

"I'm less concerned about a statement to the world," he said. "I'm more concerned about a statement to my colleagues. It's a statement about our future as well as, I think, a statement and commitment to our past."

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