The History of the Modern Office in One Building

Old tower at left, new tower at right, reworked old base at bottom. Photo: Max Touhey

Sometimes, a good tower is one you hardly notice. If you’re standing in Madison Square Park, your eye is drawn up to the stone campanile from 1909, with its round clockfaces and glowing finial. Let your gaze sweep down and to the right, and it will pass over a studiously unfussy crateful of offices erected half a century later. Raise your eyes again, and you come to the latest intervention, the black-steel-and-clear-glass tower that Kohn Pedersen Fox has just tweezered onto the existing base. In that whole full-block assemblage, you can read the evolution of the modern office building, from the tower-as-corporate-logo to the architecture of disappearance, from shaft of marble to a building apparently made entirely of light and air. The architecture of business changes, and it’s always chasing the future.

For the first half of the 20th century, Manhattan had two identities. At the edge, low sheds and long piers perpetuated the island’s ancestral role as handler of material stuff: fish, lumber, sugar, grain, steel, ships, pianos. In the center, tall towers and dark streets nurtured the accumulation of intangibles: money, knowledge, and promises. The city gradually reshaped itself around that modern trade, which had distinctive physical requirements. To keep it humming, vast numbers of workers had to converge on a few cramped zones each morning, work together all day, and disperse to distant neighborhoods at night.

Those logistical needs were met by the subway and the elevator, which moved people efficiently along a three-dimensional grid. And in those analog days, information-based businesses — like, say, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company — needed a way to order immense cataracts of paperwork. Before there were computers, there were skyscrapers. Contracts, deeds, sales slips, insurance policies, purchase orders, mailing lists, transaction records, maps, stock purchases — all these various forms of record-keeping gushed in and out of offices, making one overweening demand: You had to be able to locate any single document out of that fluid mass and pluck it out on short notice. Because what good was an insurance policy if you didn’t know where it was? Iowa farmers, cod fishermen in Massachusetts, ranchers in Colorado, and oil wildcatters in Texas depended on an army of clerks at Madison Square. A 1914 book about Metropolitan Life boasted that its clerks handled 235,000 applications per week, a volume of paperwork that demanded 60,000 square feet of real estate — more than a football field — just for filing. The only way to manage reliable nationwide insurance was to create a nested storage system, and the office building served as a vertical filing cabinet on an imperial scale. New York has long since lost its factories, banished ports to the edge, shipped entire solar systems’ worth of words and numbers from paper files to the cloud, spawned digital nomadism, and diluted rush hour. Yet, as the opening of KPF’s One Madison proves, the concept of the office tower endures, and it’s still deeply rooted in the innovations of our great-grandparents’ generation.

The original Metropolitan Life building and the tower that it gained in 1909. From left: Photo: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty ImagesPhoto: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

The original Metropolitan Life building and the tower that it gained in 1909. From top: Photo: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty ... more The original Metropolitan Life building and the tower that it gained in 1909. From top: Photo: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty ImagesPhoto: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

On this very site, MetLife pioneered the communal white-collar workspace. Unsurprisingly, it resembled a sweatshop: dozens of women, their collars high, sleeves long, hair pinned up, bent over long worktables. Tall windows supplied daylight. Men in suits kept watch. The volume of work demanded accuracy and speed, which led to the fetishization of efficiency. As the business grew, its headquarters spread, gobbling up an entire block’s worth of small buildings and wrapping the block designed by a master of the corporate Renaissance style, Napoleon LeBrun. In 1909, LeBrun crowned the complex with the clock tower, which functioned less as an office than as an overscale symbol. (It’s now a hotel.) Just as it dominated its section of the skyline, its image — emitting rays of safety from its peak and emblazoned with the motto “The Light That Never Fails” — also adorned buttons, medallions, and ads. Every customer knew that when a problem arose, someone on a high floor in Manhattan had the job of solving it. (MetLife even planned to overshadow its own icon in the 1920s with a 100-story Art Deco skyscraper across 24th Street. The Depression intervened, and construction stopped on the 31st floor, a naked pedestal without its obelisk that has been mistaken for a completed building ever since.)

In the mid-1950s, when being modern often meant wiping slates clean, the architects Lloyd Morgan and Eugene Meroni demolished LeBrun’s ornate office block and replaced it with a cool, polished-limestone box. They kept the tower, but to ensure that the holdover didn’t look too out of place, they stripped its encrustation of ornamental stonework and balconies, replacing its marble cladding with less ostentatious limestone. (In 1981, Metropolitan Life bought Pan Am’s headquarters, the monumentally modernist colossus standing astride Park Avenue and looming over Grand Central Terminal, and began a gradual move uptown. A decade later, when Pan Am went under, MetLife put up its own sign.)

The completed new tower is at right; the never-completed 1930 addition is at far left. Photo: Christopher Bonanos

In the latest update to the Madison Square complex, KPF, working for the developer SL Green, has provided LeBrun’s clock tower with a next-door companion so understated it’s barely there at all. The new shaft is a triumph of self-effacement. With its sheets of glass gridded by thin lines of darkened steel, it’s a blank comic book waiting to be filled. It sits on top of Morgan and Meroni’s nine-story base, answering its vertical limestone pinstripes with black horizontal strokes. The tower sits so far back from the street line that passersby will tend to miss it completely. To create the new addition, workers scooped out the podium’s guts, replacing them with a new concrete core. Then they set down a massive truss on the old roof to support the tower above, channeling its weight to a row of inconspicuous megacolumns inside the existing building. All that deft engineering yielded a stack of admirably open interiors, uncluttered by columns, luxuriantly ventilated to post-COVID standards, and readily adaptable to whatever notions of contemporary office culture a tenant might bring.

IBM occupies the original base and the tower’s first floor; the investment firm Franklin Templeton took another chunk of square footage, but neither needed to have much impact on the design, since KPF could be counted on to deliver office floors that are generically appealing and maximally flexible. MetLife had to fashion an environment in which women could be hired en masse, assured of safety and respectability, and assigned to the mind-numbing tasks that kept the engine of insurance purring. A century later, requirements for the equivalent physical surroundings are well established: clean air, constant temperature, abundant sunlight but minimal glare, plenty of unimpeded floor space, and a supply of glamorous urban views. One Madison’s location is ideal for the same reasons it always was — humming sidewalks, a spacious park, the subway close at hand. Right in front of the tower’s floor-to-ceiling windows, so close you can practically reach out and manually set the time on the clockface, is the tower holding aloft that old infallible light.

Office space at the complex, in photos made almost exactly a century apart. From left: Photo: Fotosearch/Getty ImagesPhoto: Kevin Chu and Jessica Paul Photography

Office space at the complex, in photos made almost exactly a century apart. From top: Photo: Fotosearch/Getty ImagesPhoto: Kevin Chu and Jessica Paul ... more Office space at the complex, in photos made almost exactly a century apart. From top: Photo: Fotosearch/Getty ImagesPhoto: Kevin Chu and Jessica Paul Photography

It’s true that with this new building, SL Green is dumping more commercial square footage onto a disastrously glutted market, but developers keep insisting that new or refreshed, high-quality offices that are well located and fitted out with alluring amenities are still filling up and paying off. One Madison’s slate of attractions includes a public gym (run by Chelsea Piers Fitness) so spacious and luxuriant that members might be tempted to move in. But the building’s ace in the hole is its resident chef, Daniel Boulud, who runs the new restaurant La Tête d’Or on the ground floor and the tenants-only clubhouse on the roof, both designed by the Rockwell Group. (The downstairs kitchen furnishes the rooftop menu.) Rockwell has perfected a mixture of theatricality and coziness, one that can make even a dull dinner seem like an event. That’s true of the vast, multi-room restaurant, where the centerpiece is an immense range-hood-as-sculpture that sucks up smoke from the open kitchen. It’s even more apparent in the freestanding rooftop hall, vaulted with wooden ribs that give it a certain Hogwartsian air. At one end, the glass wall slides back, opening onto an outdoor lounge, with the skyline winking beyond a virtually invisible railing of glass. Even if you’re there for a boring lunch meeting, or just gobbling down a sandwich, the surroundings and the view make it feel as though there’s an awful lot at stake.

The reconstructed building's shared rooftop amenities. From left: Photo: Adrian Gaut/ Photo: Kevin Chu and Jessica Paul Photography

The reconstructed building's shared rooftop amenities. From top: Photo: Adrian Gaut/ ... more The reconstructed building's shared rooftop amenities. From top: Photo: Adrian Gaut/ Photo: Kevin Chu and Jessica Paul Photography