LVMH Tower facts for kids
Quick facts for kids LVMH Tower |
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| General information | |
| Architectural style | Postmodern Art Deco |
| Address | 19 East 57th Street |
| Town or city | New York, NY |
| Country | USA |
| Coordinates | 40°45′45.66″N 73°58′21.55″W / 40.7626833°N 73.9726528°W |
| Current tenants | LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE |
| Opened | December 8, 1999 |
| Technical details | |
| Floor count | 24 |
| Design and construction | |
| Architect | Christian de Portzamparc |
| Structural engineer | Weiskops and Pickworth |
| Other designers | Hillier Group (associate architects and interior design) |
The LVMH Tower is the United States headquarters of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, which opened in 1999. It is a 24-story skyscraper on East 57th Street in Manhattan, near Madison Avenue, and was designed by Christian de Portzamparc. The building has received widespread praise from architecture critics.
Contents
History
Ground was broken for the building in 1996, but work was then largely halted for four years by disagreements over financing with the landlord, Robert Siegel, and logistical problems with manufacturing the components in multiple countries. The building opened on December 8, 1999, with a gala that included a model wearing a Galliano gown whose 60-foot train cascaded down the facade.
Design
The building occupies a narrow site between a 1920s bank building and the 1995 American headquarters of Chanel S.A. (designed by Charles Platt after de Portzamparc had completed his design for the LVMH Tower) and across the street from 590 Madison Avenue, a large tower built for IBM. In contrast to all of these, it is clad in glass. An eleven-story base includes ground-level store space for Christian Dior, designed by Peter Marino, with a metal strip above it that acts as a unifying element. The tower itself has a complex, angular facade divided into two sections on the diagonal, with the right (east) side projecting and bent in the middle, producing a geometry that has been described as feminine, like the fall of a skirt over a bent knee, and also, including by de Portzamparc himself, as resembling the unfolding petals of a flower. A blue glass cube at the center of the fold on the 10th floor resembles a gem. The glass on the left (west) side is green, with fritted dots; on the right side, it is milky white, with each window divided at an angle into a sandblasted half and a clear half with sandblasted lines across it that grow wider on higher floors. The facade also uses ultra-clear low-iron glass. It has set a precedent for other buildings erected by manufacturers of luxury goods.
At night, the white section of the building is lighted in pale green and violet and the other half recedes; neon tubes under the front fold provide a slash of changing colored light.
The folded facade with its protrusion is an innovative interpretation of the requirement for setbacks in the New York City building code, with a void in the lower section and with the upper section folding back outward in a prismatic rather than a "wedding-cake" shape. Having the building touch the mandated setback line at the minimum two points and folding it inwards from the base to the top made it possible for it to be taller than the neighboring Chanel Building.
Each business within the LVMH group has its own floor in the building. The interior design, by the Hillier Group, de Portzamparc's U.S. associate architects on the project, features glass, pressed wood, and metal in the elevator lobby and a glass-enclosed cubic reception space on the top floor, three floors or thirty feet high, made possible by the savings in floor space below, which LMVH calls the Magic Room. This is entered in dramatic fashion down a curving stairway from a mezzanine floor.
Projected addition
A planned addition, including an obelisk echoing the IBM Building and a slab of fritted glass at the Madison Avenue corner, was canceled in 2001 because of the economic downturn.
See also
In Spanish: LVMH Tower para niños
