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In Hood's design, the vertical and Gothic-inspired detailing of the building's austere Art Deco facade is integrated with a slim, functionally expressive form. Inside, this modern skyscraper features an open floor plan. Like the other buildings in the complex, whose overall appearance varies little from the RCA tower, this structure is clad in fine materials. Deer Island granite covers the building base to a height of four feet, and the shaft has a refined facade of Indiana limestone with aluminum spandrel panels. Lee Lawrie's limestone and glass sculptural relief marks the main entrance.

Inside the lobby, Jose Maria Sert's painted on canvas mural on the theme of American Progress replaced a more controversial work painted as a traditional fresco by the left-wing artists Diego Rivera and Ben Shahn. The lobby's rich materials and reduced black and beige ornamental scheme is enhanced by dramatic lighting. An escalator--a striking feature for the time--provides access to the shopping concourse below.

Built in 1931-1933 for the Radio Corporation of America. 
After sixteen months of work, this building became at 259 m the tallest in the Rockefeller Center. The owner company moved into this simplified slab from its decor-topped Lexington Avenue tower and housed its National Broadcast Company and operations here. 

Clad in white Indiana limestone, the 70-storey building's jagged form follows the zoning regulations imposed on high-rise buildings. Each setback also corresponds to a reduction in the amount of elevators, and thus in the total size of elevator shafts. 

The construction of this building was made possible, from the legal point-of-view, by the combination of all of the land in Rockefeller Center into one zoning lot, so that there was enough "air" space around the building. 

The "economy" of the 195,200 m² building impressed even the hardened businessmen who rented the office space to various tenants: no rentable area was off the maximum (profitable) distance from the windows; it was also Hood's aim to provide every workroom with direct natural lightning. The building housed at the time of its completion the largest floor area of any commercial building hitherto. 

The 65th floor houses the stylish Rainbow Room restaurant with generous views over Midtown. For decades the terraced open-air observatory was open to the public, until the expansion of the restaurant and its adjoining Rainbow Grill bar lounge necessitated the closing of the rooftop facility. 

The Art Deco decoration of the building follows the heroic and mythical themes, combined with praise of modernity and visualized in form of classical figures at work or gods and goddesses of specific virtues. The Rockefellers, in fact, employed the mind of consultant philosopher Hartley Burr Alexander who defined the ideological theme for the Center. In the niché above the entrance is Lee Lawrie's relief Genius. The lobby artwork was originally to be commissioned from such heavyweights as Matisse and Picasso, but eventually José Maria Sert made the murals American Progress and Time, whereas Diego Rivera's mural incorporating Lenin as "the leader of the worker's movement" was too much, leading to its removal... 

At the foot of the building is the sunken plaza, originally planned as an entrance to the center's subway station. As the construction of the subway station was delayed, the plaza was lined with below-grade luxury shops. In 1936, to divert attention from the commercial failures of the retailers, the plaza was first turned into a public roller rink and subsequently into a more upper class wintertime ice skating rink and a summertime café. Paul Manship's gilded bronze sculpture Prometheus lies above the fountain pool of the plaza. Every Christmas an illuminated giant spruce is erected on Rockefeller Plaza above the statue -- the first one was a 1931 construction workers' tree, a more down-to-earth decorated one too. 

The flat roof between the main tower and the wing facing Sixth Avenue (the GE Building West) houses a roof-top garden. 

The building changed hands in 1986, when General Electric incorporated RCA, along with its subsidiary NBC. Ten years later, when the Center was bought by a group led by Goldman Sachs and Jerry Speyer, the condominium interest of the building was sold to NBC for $440 million.