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New York Architecture
Images- Midtown Daily News Building |
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architect |
Raymond Hood, André Fouilhoux and John Mead Howells Addition by Harrison & Abramowitz [1958] |
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location |
220 E42 (bet . Second and Third Aves) |
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date |
1929-1930 |
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style |
Art Deco |
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construction |
The 37-storey facade is characterized by vertical stripes of windows, with brown brick in the spandrels between the vertically aligned windows, and white brickwork forming the separating vertical piers. Limestone, preferred by Hood, was discarded as a too expensive material. Curiously, the size of the windows -- and thus the width of the window stripes -- was determined by the size of a window that could be effortlessly opened by a single office worker. The tops of the window stripes are decorated with ornamentated spandrels extending all the way to the top, sloping there inward, splitted by a narrow pier. The "razed" flat top at 145 m influenced a host of future skyscrapers and Hood himself used the form of the building tower as an influence for the forthcoming RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. |
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type |
Office Building |
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| Rendering copyright Simon Fieldhouse. Click here for a Simon Fieldhouse gallery. | |
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The Daily News Building, also known as The News Building, was the home of
the New York Daily News. It is known as the model for the headquarters
of the fictional newspaper Daily Planet, the building where Superman
works as journalist Clark Kent. It was headquarters for The New York
Daily News until the mid-1990's. It is located at 220 E. 42nd St. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989. The News Building is the home for former News TV subsidiary WPIX and was also home to WQCD, the smooth jazz station The News had operated as WPIX-FM. Some time after former News parent Tribune Company took over WQCD outright, the station was sold to Emmis Communications. |
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At a time when other developers shunned the area east of the Third Avenue El, the Daily News selected this site so that it could house its noisy printing presses in the same facility as its editorial offices. Designed by Raymond Hood, the building contained the newspaper's offices and speculative office space in a tower set back above a 10-story base with larger floors to accommodate the presses. Its facade features a 3-story granite slab above the entrance that is decorated with an image of office workers underneath a sunburst motif illuminating the News Building rising above. Art Deco features of the exterior facade include the use of polychrome brick and red and black spandrels between the windows. The bold verticality of the tower, the repetitive windows, and the flat, bare facade are early characteristics of the International Style that would gain popularity in New York after World War II. The costly building was constructed when the Daily News had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the United States. A large, revolving globe, set against a backdrop of black glass and aluminum in the center of the lobby, symbolized the paper's global perspective and quickly became a tourist attraction. An addition designed by Harrison and Abramowitz was added to the east side of the tower in 1958. |
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