[NYguy]

^ Yeah, we’re at the setback.



https://commercialobserver.com/2022/...rena-270-park/

JPMorgan Chase Real Estate Chief David Arena On 270 Park Avenue
Several trends converge in the under-construction tower, including coworking, sustainability, hybrid work and wellness


BY DAVID M. LEVITT
AUGUST 9, 2022

Skyscrapers rising in Manhattan are nothing new, but every successive skyscraper is an expression of its time, including the obsessions and delusions.

In that way, the new 270 Park Avenue is fully within those traditions. The future 1,388-foot, 60-story JPMorgan Chase & Co. headquarters tower will sport a 50-foot-tall lobby with fan columns weighing 350,000 pounds on which the rest of the tower will sit. The support beams are already there; the tower is to open in 2025. (For comparison, the Empire State Building with its spire is 1,454 feet tall.)

JPMorgan won’t say how much it is spending. A price tag of $3 billion has been reported elsewhere.

The tower, designed by the world-renowned Norman Foster, is an expression of the centrality of global investment banks, especially to New York, where finance has always been what oil is to Dallas or Houston, and movies are to Los Angeles. The lobby alone will be something to see, with natural light seeping in from all directions, and the ability to look from Park all the way to Madison Avenue a block away. However you cut it, the JPMorgan Chase headquarters tower and its lobby will be the latest expression of the continued power and importance of New York City’s financial mammoths.

David Arena, the bank’s global head of real estate, described the old 270 Park, however, as hopelessly outdated. Because it was built in the 1950s, it could not have met the environmental standards the city expects of buildings today. The new No. 270 will house up to 14,000 employees and provide for net-zero carbon emissions.

Of course, whenever a project this massive is undertaken, it’s at the mercy of everything that takes place in the seven years between its conception and completion, which in this case encompasses an entire pandemic and a trend toward working remotely that has especially taken hold in banks.

From the interview:

Talk about what this building does better than the old building. Why is this building better than the one that was there, which was also JPMorgan’s global headquarters?


We treasured the building when we had it, but it was designed in the ’50s, built in the late ’50s. Opened in the early ’60s for 3,600 people [when JPMorgan left, there were more than 6,000 employees in it]; not enough bathrooms, systems that couldn’t adequately support a trading business, and, really, a modern workforce.

You could arguably say that Park Avenue is a treasure and maybe unique in Manhattan, maybe unique in all the world; people are starting to rediscover that.

So, the first thing, it’s in the right spot. It’s right next to transit.

The second thing is going back to our constituents. From a community point of view, we raised the building up. And the building has 250 percent more public realm space. So it’s got big, double-wide sidewalks on 47th and 48th street. It has a really large public park on Madison Avenue with water features. We’re going to commission artwork, plantings, etc. It will be a great refuge for people in the neighborhood.

On the Park Avenue side, we have a big plaza, a la, say, Seagram’s plaza. That makes you feel great about the neighborhood. We respected the urban context and our neighbors. And it is one of the few buildings where you can see from Park Avenue through to Madison Avenue, from one side through to the other. The building is built to be transparent at the base.

The other thing is that this building is all electric. And all that electricity is bought from a hydroelectric plant in upstate New York. It has zero carbon emissions from operations.

The ceiling height in the old building was somewhere between 8.5 and 9 feet. The newer building will be a little bit higher: 9.5, 10.5 feet, 15.5 on the trading floors.

It has the latest in cybersecurity, biometric access.

We invited Deepak Chopra and Danny Meyer to be on the team. Danny Meyer from Union Square Hospitality, and Chopra, I think he’s voted the world’s most respected physician, to help us promote wellness in the building.

Here we will have biophilic design. I thought that was about plants, but it’s really not. Biophilia is design based on humans’ connection to nature. And that can be everything from fractal patterns to materials; the building will have circadian lighting. That’s lighting that mimics the natural light of the sun and the rhythm of the day.

We will have great restaurants, great places for our people to meet and collaborate. They will also double as coworking spaces. So, when people just want to drop in, they will drop in to a great hospitality space.