The New York Times Building, New York, USA 

The latest head office of the New York Times is located in the centre of Manhattan. Renzo Piano designed a tower with 52 storeys plus five-storey “podium”. It is this latter element that contains an auditorium with 350 seats, an internal garden and exclusive retail outlets – all open to the public. And this fact is reflected in the architecture: an exquisite all-glass façade just over 6.5 m high at ground floor level caters for an inquisitive public, allowing them an unobstructed view into the building.

Inside or outside? The building itself turns the accustomed upside down and slips its inside over its outside. The entire loadbearing steelwork and the wind girders are placed outside the building envelope, the façades behind. The glazing to the ground floor, too, follows this principle and is designed from outside to inside. Every two steel flats with their striking perforations are bolted via stainless steel brackets to pairs of columns. The inward-facing brackets in turn are fitted into the nodes of the secondary structure, which is followed by the insulating glass and the glazing beads. Customary design principles lose their validity: drainage of the sections has to be “reversed”, impermeable layers are in the reverse order. Wind and weather conditions were simulated on a mock-up under extreme conditions, recorded precisely and coordinated with the technical details of the design.

Architect: Renzo Piano

Client: The New York Times Company

Structural Systems: Thornton Tomasetti

Façade Surface: 3.500m²

Completion: 2007