The Brooklyn Rail

A new 2.5 million-square-foot headquarters for JPMorgan Chase, designed by Foster + Partners, is being built at 270 Park Avenue. The previously existing structure on the site—a 1.5 million-square-foot tower built for the Union Carbide Corporation in 1960, designed by Natalie Griffin de Blois at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—has had to be dismantled in place. This continuous process of deconstruction and construction represents a type of architecture worth studying: the never-ending construction site. The demolition of the sixties skyscraper, which began back in 2019, was at the time the tallest building “voluntarily” demolished. An icon of the International Style of modern architecture, with its glass and I-beam facade and luminous lobby, this was a building that represented the sleek confidence of the post-war US and contributed to significant innovations in structural and environmental engineering. The building’s foundation had to be placed between underground train tracks below, and architects developed a modular ceiling system that integrated lighting, air-conditioning, and movable partitions. Foster + Partners’s structure, which replaces de Blois’s, is representative of the constant looping and changing hands of contemporary capitalist production as seen in construction practices: from the industrial capitalism of Union Carbide to the current dominance of finance capitalism in JPMorgan Chase. The assumption that new is automatically better, simultaneously calling for the erasure and replacement of the old, has yielded a building that is simply eight stories taller and constructed in place of a perfectly functional fifty-two-story skyscraper—and one that took up an entire city block.

What we see during the construction process of 270 Park Avenue, beyond that of the lifted belly of the building, is an extreme example of the modernist ambition for visual transparency and universal expansion. More than the glossy renderings of the final building, this structure tells us the true nature of the work that will happen in this corporate headquarters. An open steel beam superstructure elevating concrete slabs reveals the ghost of modernism’s past. What is being built will culminate the modernist ambition for pure abstraction and the assumption that the world is a tabula rasa. Foster lays out his historical argument: “In 1811, when this site was countryside, the city commissioners created a master plan for New York. It was bold, innovative, and reflected an optimism for the future. Today, over two hundred years later, the same things are true of 270 Park Avenue.” The architect references The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which would become the famous Manhattan grid between Houston and 155th Streets. This organizational device was indifferent to the existing ecology and landscape of the island, and Foster’s position takes on a far more cynical tone. He echoes the modernist attitude prevalent during the early 1800s, but also at the time the 1960 skyscraper was erected: that abstraction was the necessary device to promote the linear and progressive march of history. But at 270 Park Avenue, this dubious political project has been stripped away, and we see the raw truth of the capitalist project: that innovation for the sake of innovation is a social good and that the world is an inexhaustible blank slate.

This fait accompli reasoning is bolstered by the fact that the multinational corporation JPMorgan Chase increasingly operates in financial technology and AI, which is more abstract and socially indifferent than the postwar corporate boom. This is further emphasized by the trajectory of the change in occupancy, from an industrial chemical production company (Union Carbide), to Manufacturers Hanover Trust, to Chemical Bank, and now JPMorgan Chase. Here, we see the growing dominance of finance, tech, and real estate in the global market economy. Corporate architecture too has changed to reflect this. But it’s not in the final building that we need a new form, it’s here in the skeleton of a construction site. Twenty-first-century capitalism utilizes unlimited profit generation as its operating system for construction, rather than the creation of infrastructure itself, engaging in a process of never-ending demolition/construction.

Ever more dematerialized and abstract, we can watch this process evolving in our cities. Primarily relying on speculation and innovation, the logic at the core of a financial corporation such as JPMorgan Chase is evidently here translated into architectural terms and construction logic. We are watching the loss of not just another building, but also the possibility of thinking of adaptive reuse, renovating existing buildings, or preservation as models to follow for a city contending with the realities of the climate and housing crisis.

270 Park Avenue’s construction is justified by the gains over the previous 700-foot-tall 1960 building. The new JPMorgan Chase headquarters will stand almost seven hundred feet taller at around 1,400 feet, and accommodate approximately ten thousand more employees. Foster boasts, “It does more with less—more public space, fresh air, light and views—and less carbon through electric, green energy.” Yet the true environmental impact lies in the crude reality of the tremendous embodied carbon that it carries. The new construction is a product of rezoning in 2017 that leveraged incentives around promoting Midtown East as a leader in global business districts. To do so, investors needed something new to promote: a monument to the image of a financial center. It is a pastiche of a historical period and a high-tech nod to the ghost of the site: this is the aesthetic of contemporary capitalism. JPMorgan Chase utilizes a superstructure of steel beams fanning from the ground to four points outwards on Madison and Park Avenue. Much like the symbolic use of I-beams on Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building facade, 270 Park’s I-beams follow the trajectory of the fanning truss structure upwards. They are clad with aluminum panels to give them the appearance of oversized I-beams in an odd postmodern referential collage of modernism.

What is new though is not the technology that the building will contain (it will be the largest all-electric tower in New York, with net zero operational emissions), but that an important building at such a scale—the former Union Carbide Building—is being torn down at a moment when it is so inappropriate to do so. While the modernist emphasis on tabula rasa had an ideological position grounded in a utopian belief in the brave new world of science and technology, what is the ideology here? What is the point of tearing down a huge building? This is architecture without ideology—a construction and demolition project informed not by a new social project driving society, but rather a market-driven evolution of capitalism. The only legible ideology is change. What would truly be new is a renovation of an existing building: proposing a change in how we build and think about the buildings and carbon already around us. At this point in our understanding of the urban organism, we at least have the benefit of historical experience to understand the devastating consequences of razing entire blocks and buildings for new construction. Despite this, Natalie Griffin de Blois’s building was torn down anyway. This is an analogy for how we deal with the environmental crisis: while we know we cannot continue living like this, we do it regardless. Here at 270 Park Ave, we find the fundamental condition of the moment: total contradiction.