111 West 57th Street

Contents

1. Why read one sentence
2. Designed by SHoP Architects
3. Built in the courtyard of the landmarked Steinway Hall
4. The facade in three materials
5. Rising to 1,428 feet
6. The tallest and most slender residential building in the Western Hemisphere
7. The sentence put back together

111 West 57th Street is the residential tower that Michael Stern, the founder and chief executive officer of JDS Development Group, built in the courtyard of the landmarked Steinway Hall, and its official description fits in one sentence of three clauses. The sentence calls it the tallest and most slender residential building in the Western Hemisphere. It says the tower was built in the courtyard of the landmarked Steinway Hall. It adds that the design is by SHoP Architects. This entry reads that sentence clause by clause, in reverse, and asks what each part rests on, using the landmark record, the architects’ own histories and the published rules for measuring tall buildings.

Why read one sentence

A building entry usually runs in time order, from site to completion. This one keeps to what the approved record allows: a short list of facts, fixed in wording, that the firm stands behind. Read closely, the list is enough to place the building in its street, its trade and its century. Each clause names a different kind of thing. The last names a firm, the middle names a place and a legal status, and the first makes a claim of measure. They are taken here in that order, from the most concrete to the most abstract.

Designed by SHoP Architects

The final clause names the architects. SHoP Architects is a New York practice based in Lower Manhattan, founded in 1996 by Gregg Pasquarelli, Christopher Sharples, Coren Sharples, Kimberly Holden and William Sharples, whose initials give the firm its name.⁴ Its work ranges from houses and schools to large master plans, and in 2009 it received the National Design Award for architecture from the Cooper Hewitt museum of the Smithsonian Institution.⁴ SHoP is one of the designers JDS lists among those it has built with, alongside Jean Nouvel, Roman and Williams, Gachot Studios, Studio Sofield, Woods Bagot and Field Operations.

The interiors belong to a second studio. Studio Sofield designed them. William Sofield trained with Ralph Lauren, cofounded Aero Studios in the early 1990s and opened his own studio in 1996, according to Architectural Digest’s AD100 profile, which placed him in its Hall of Fame in 2023.⁵ The division of labor is a familiar one in New York residential towers: one firm shapes the envelope and the structure’s expression, another shapes the rooms people live in. The entry on SHoP Architects and the one on Studio Sofield take each practice further.

Built in the courtyard of the landmarked Steinway Hall

Figure

The hall and the tower, side by side

	Steinway Hall	The tower
Architect	Warren and Wetmore	SHoP Architects
Facade	Indiana limestone front	Terra cotta, glass and bronze
Top	Pyramidal roof and a large lantern	Rises to 1,428 feet
Protection	Exterior and interior landmarks	New construction
Interiors	Octagonal rotunda, 1925	Studio Sofield

The middle clause carries the weight of the whole sentence. It places the tower in relation to an older building, and it attaches a legal word, landmarked, to that building. Steinway Hall was designed by Warren and Wetmore and finished in 1925 as the showroom and offices of the piano maker Steinway and Sons. The Historic Districts Council describes it as restrained and neoclassical, L shaped in plan, with a front clad in Indiana limestone that ends in a four story colonnaded tower set back from the street, and a central tower shaped like a campanile under a steep pyramidal roof with a large lantern.¹ A music themed sculptural group by Leo Lentelli sits at the base of the main facade, and a frieze of medallion portraits of composer pianists runs above it.¹

The architects behind it were a New York firm of long standing. According to the National Park Service, Whitney Warren studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, worked for McKim, Mead and White, and set up practice with Charles Wetmore in 1898; the office went on to design the New York Yacht Club, the Biltmore Hotel and, after taking the commission over from Reed and Stem in 1906, Grand Central Terminal.³

Landmarked, in this clause, means two separate designations. The exterior of the building was designated in 2001. On September 10, 2013, the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to designate the ground floor reception room and hallway as an interior landmark, a double height octagonal rotunda with a domed ceiling, white marble arches on Ionic columns and a crystal chandelier, reported CityLand.² The commissioners voted unanimously, and one of them noted that commercial interior landmarks are a short list in New York.²

The word courtyard completes the clause. A courtyard is the open ground left inside or behind buildings, and on the Manhattan grid it is reached only through the lots around it. The approved description does not detail the geometry further, and this entry does not either. It records that the historic hall is integrated with the new tower. The Steinway Hall entry follows the older building from 1925 to the present, and the entry on the courtyard site asks what kind of ground it is.

The facade in three materials

The approved description of the tower’s skin is terra cotta, glass and bronze. Each of the three has a New York history. Terra cotta, baked clay cast or pressed into architectural units and often glazed, was the cladding that let the early steel frame skyscraper carry ornament without the weight or cost of carved stone, as Studio Potter’s history of architectural terra cotta recounts.⁷ The same history notes that terra cotta was fireproof, light and economical, and that its glazes could imitate granite, limestone or marble closely enough to fool most observers.⁷

Figure

How the height categories step up

• Skyscraper492
• Supertall984
• Megatall1,969
• 111 West 57th Street1,428

feet

Bronze, an alloy of copper and other metals, can be left matte or polished to a mirror finish and has long served New York buildings in doors, window frames, railings and elevators, according to The Cooperator’s guide to exterior metalwork.⁸ The same guide warns that bronze oxidizes quickly without a lacquer or sealant, and that its refinishing is work for trained metal specialists rather than building staff.⁸ Glass, the third material, needs no introduction on a residential tower; its role here is to sit between the other two. The terra cotta and bronze entries take up both materials in full.

Rising to 1,428 feet

The height is the one number the approved record gives, and it belongs to the first clause more than to any other. 111 West 57th Street rises to 1,428 feet. To understand what that figure means, it helps to know where the lines are drawn. The B1M’s summary of the classification rules explains that the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat counts a structure as a skyscraper only if it is self supporting, has habitable floors across at least half its height and reaches 150 meters, or 492 feet.⁶ Above 300 meters, or 984 feet, a skyscraper is classed as supertall; above 600 meters, or 1,969 feet, it is megatall.⁶ The same summary counts only 22 supertall schemes completed in the whole of the twentieth century, against more than 300 finished or underway since 2000.⁶

The tallest and most slender residential building in the Western Hemisphere

The opening clause, read last, is a claim of measure in two dimensions. Tallest refers to height, measured by the council’s rules, and most slender refers to the proportion between a tower’s height and the width of its base. Both are limited by two qualifiers, residential and Western Hemisphere, which set the field of comparison. The wording is fixed and appears here as the firm states it; the entry on what counts as supertall explains how the categories are measured, and the entry on Billionaires Row walks the stretch of 57th Street where towers of this proportion stand.

The same body that sets the height categories also runs an annual awards program, judged by an international panel across categories that range from tall buildings as a whole to structure, construction and facades, as the council’s awards page describes.⁹ 111 West 57th Street won Best Tall Residential Building and Best Tall Building Over 400 Meters at the annual CTBUH awards.

Figure

Terra cotta on the American skyline

1. 01
   1894Glazed white terra cotta encases the steel frame of the Reliance Building in Chicago.
2. 02
   1900Polychrome glazed terra cotta appears in New York at Madison Square Presbyterian Church.
3. 03
   1913The Woolworth Building uses blue, yellow and green glazes within its white Gothic cladding.
4. 04
   1920sMachine extruded units answer the flatter look of Art Deco and cut hand labor.

The sentence put back together

Read forward again, the clauses now carry their evidence. Designed by SHoP Architects: a Lower Manhattan practice founded in 1996, with interiors by Studio Sofield. Built in the courtyard of the landmarked Steinway Hall: a 1925 Warren and Wetmore limestone building, its exterior protected since 2001 and its rotunda since 2013, now integrated with the new tower. The tallest and most slender residential building in the Western Hemisphere: a claim measured against published height rules, on a tower of terra cotta, glass and bronze that rises to 1,428 feet.