Part of a pioneering multi-use complex with two apartment towers atop a seven-story office base, 860 and 870 opened in 1966 and immediately took their places among the city’s best cooperative houses.
The architects of these buildings were Max Abramovitz and Wallace Harrison. The firm, founded in 1941 by Wallace Harrison (1895–1981), J. André Fouilhoux (1879–1945), and Max Abramovitz (1908–2004), was best known for modernist corporate towers on the East Coast and in Midwestern cities. Most are straightforward.
The firm’s first significant project was the United Nations headquarters in New York City (1947–52). Other notable projects include general site planning and the Plaza for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York (1961–1966), David Geffen Hall (formerly Avery Fisher Hall, opened as Philharmonic Hall) at Lincoln Center (1962), and the Metropolitan Opera House, which opened the very same year. The Met shares unmistakable design elements with our own lobby; red carpet, marble floors, and “kevazingo wood” paneling, all of which were part of Harrison and Abramovitz’s vision.
Version 23 of the United Nations Plan by Le Courbusier from A workshop for peace; the creation of the United Nations Headquarters. 2005, UN/Peter Rosen Prod
The United Nations Plaza complex has two architectural inspirations. In the late 1940’s, as the United Nations headquarters was being designed by a consortium of internationally renowned architects, the French Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who played a critical role in the design, proposed a pair of identical slabs for the north end of the UN site, perpendicular to the Secretariat Building, as a way of adding an element of compositional balance to the UN as well as providing additional office space. The additional towers were dropped from the final plans, but they were not forgotten by the architect Wallace K. Harrison, who had coordinated the international team designing the UN. In the early 1960’s, when the block north of the UN was made available for private development, Harrison and his partner Max Abramovitz were commissioned to design a luxury apartment and office complex for the site, and they took Le Corbusier’s pair of matching towers as the starting point for their design.
If it was Le Corbusier who first suggested the idea of two towers set perpendicular to the river and facing south over the United Nations complex, it was another architect, Mies van der Rohe, whose aesthetic gave Harrison and Abramovitz many of the specifics of their design. Mies, as he was known, was the architect of the most refined and elegant glass towers of the age, including a celebrated pair of identical glass
apartment towers in Chicago, 860 and 880 Lake Shore Drive. (Yes, the numbers almost match those of 860 and 870 UN Plaza, a happy coincidence.) When the United Nations Plaza complex was being designed, Mies had recently completed the Seagram Building, his masterwork on Park Avenue, widely hailed as a major achievement of the postwar period. New York by then had numerous glass office towers, but most apartment buildings of that era were banal structures of white brick. What better way to give this new complex distinction than to sheath it in glass like Mies’s Chicago towers? A glass curtain wall would both tie the new towers more closely to the United Nations and give the building light, views, and a kind of modernist elegance that, back then, no other residential building in New York could claim.
And so Harrison and Abramovitz sought to mimic Mies van der Rohe’s serene proportions and precise detailing in the handsome curtain wall of their towers. At the same time, however, they made the United Nations Plaza complex their own, giving it a mid-century flair that was more in line with much of the firm’s other work, such as the Empire State Plaza in Albany, the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, and the Socony-Mobil building in midtown Manhattan, than with Mies’s buildings. The grand, high residential lobby, joining the two towers, is pure Harrison and Abramovitz, mixing the serenity and order of Mies’s architecture with the exuberance of Harrison and Abramovitz’s best mid-century buildings. The office podium above which the towers rise made it logical for the two towers to share an entry, unlike in Mies’s Chicago buildings, where each tower is separate and has a small ground-floor lobby. But this gave Harrison and Abramovitz a chance to design an interior that would be complex, idiosyncratic, and high-spirited in a way that differed from Mies. They introduced textured walls of marble, kevazingo wood, and Italian chandeliers, and turned the necessity of the long walk from the front door to the elevators into a splendid architectural procession. Most important, they showed that they could join Mies’s characteristic purity and restraint to their own modernist aesthetic, and created at the United Nations Plaza a piece of architecture that would be not only memorable, but unique.
