Wally Harrison

The new tower at 1271 Avenue of the Americas borrowed heavily from its successful Rockefeller

Center siblings, beginning with its architects. To design the property, the joint venture RockTime Inc. turned to the firm of Harrison, Abramovitz &

Harris. Its lead partner, Wallace K. Harrison, had played a central role in designing the original complex and several of its towers, including the original 36-story Time & Life Building on Rockefeller Plaza. Beginning in the early 1930s, Harrison had developed a close working relationship with Nelson Rockefeller that came to underpin many of the architect’s biggest projects. Harrison biographer Victoria Newhouse called the two-man act “one of the most

remarkable relationships between a powerful client and an outstanding architect.” Early on in his career, Worcester-born Wally Harrison worked as a draftsman for McKim, Mead & White, the

firm behind the imposing Beaux-Arts-style Pennsylvania Station on New York’s Seventh Avenue. Harrison continued his formal education at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and via a traveling fellowship through Europe and the Middle East during his McKim, Mead days. A few years later, Harrison headed a team of hundreds of architects churning out school designs for the New York City Board of Education in a huge Brooklyn loft. That effort, which also required considerable organizational and management skills, served him well in a later series of prominent projects for which he had to harness together the talents of some of the world’s top architects. Among the products of those team efforts were the United Nations Headquarters along the East River (on land donated by the Rockefellers), Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on Manhattan’s west side, and the 1939 and 1964 world’s fairs in Flushing, Queens. His work at Rockefeller Center was the longest running of Harrison’s team efforts, stretching well over 30 years, deep into the 1960s with his work on the XYZ Buildings. To lead those later projects, Harrison turned to Michael M. Harris, a younger partner in his firm and his deputy, who had led the planning for the UN and who did most of the work on the Time & Life Building.

APRIL 1931, ARCHITECTS Raymond Hood, Wallace Harrison, and L. Andrew Reinhard with a model of Rockefeller Center (top left).

WALLY HARRISON AND Nelson Rockefeller watch construction of concrete houses financed by Rockefeller, 1949 (above).

TIME INC. VICE president Weston C. Pullen, Jr., president of Rockefeller Center G. S. Eyssell, and Wallace Harrison look at plans (bottom left).

A TURBOPROP AIRCRAFT engine creates storm conditions for a dynamic weather test on a mockup of the Time & Life Building façade. Garden City, New York, 1958 (above).

A TWO-STORY MOCKUP was erected in Astoria, Queens to test out designs, December 1957 (right).

THE SIDEWALK SUPERINTENDENT’S Club, a popular Rockefeller Center attraction revived for the construction of the Time & Life Building, is a fun public relations stunt. The enclosed shed made space for dozens of looky-loos to view the action. The Club gives out membership cards and has informal rules. It serves a practical purpose, too: keeping gawkers from getting in the way (left).

FOR THE GRAND reopening of the Sidewalk Superintendent’s Club on July 2, 1957, Marilyn Monroe swans into town via helicopter from her Hamptons summer home two hours late. She misses host Laurance Rockefeller— who couldn’t wait any longer—by mere moments. Using a comically large match, Marilyn lights a super-size firecracker that touches off a very real blast of dynamite in the pit of the Time & Life Building site nearby (above).

LOOKING NORTHEAST ON September 26, 1958 at the 50th Street side of the rising building, the extension wraparound is visible in the left foreground. The Time & Life Building was two months from topping out (left).

ROCKEFELLER CENTER CELEBRATES the holiday season with two Christmas trees in 1958. To mark the topping out of steelwork on the Time & Life Building, construction crews hoist a 35-foot lighted tree to the newly minted 48th floor (right).

While the façade features soaring columns sheathed in the same Indiana limestone as on the spire’s older siblings across the avenue, behind that stonework are steel beams that hold the building up, along with air-conditioning duct work. Exiling those traditional tower innards to the exterior, the publisher’s design committee argued, would give the interior cleaner lines and fewer obstructions, making it easier to lay out. This became especially important in light of Time Inc.’s decision to use a new system of moveable glass-topped partitions to wall off some floors into modular offices of as little as 75 square feet, each made up of basic building-block modules measuring 4 feet by 4 feet 8 inches. This flexible partitioning allowed for a more efficient use of the acreage; the company calculated it saved the equivalent of an entire 28,000-square-foot office floor with this innovation. Meanwhile, the tower’s curtain wall, which had more glass and less stone than the earlier Rock Center buildings, used clear rather than tinted glass, yielding brighter interiors. This was less a detail and more a crucial decision for a building that housed print publications and art directors who relied on the natural light to review graphic designs and photos.

AN UNFINISHED INTERIOR floor is a presage of the modern open-plan office environment. With no columns to interrupt the main work space, the floors could be configured uniquely for Time Inc. and to each tenant’s specifications (above).

WORKING IN TWO-PERSON teams, construction workers install the curtain wall. The limestone columns are set 28 feet apart; aluminum mullions between them create a soaring pin-striped effect, and the rest is glass (left).

MOVEABLE PARTITIONS CREATE offices around the perimeter, leaving the interior areas available for cubicles and traffic. Henry Luce had his eye on cost efficiency with this plan; it would allow Time Inc. to expand and contract, making space available for subleasing (right).

A VIEW OF the northern elevation under construction. The building’s extension—also known as the bustle, podium, or wraparound—gives the 51st Street view a different look from its 50th Street counterpart (opposite).

X MARKS THE spot on the newly installed curtain wall. Accidental collisions with newly fixed vision glass are avoided by marking with paint (top left).

A LARGE TEAM of glaziers is necessary to install a 9 feet 5 inches by 14 feet 5 inches pane of glass into the ground floor windows of the Time & Life Building (top right).

LAURANCE ROCKEFELLER (Board Chairman, Rockefeller Center, Inc.) and Henry R. Luce (cofounder and editor in chief, Time Inc.) at the laying of the cornerstone (right).

As the first Center building conceived and constructed in the 1950s, Time & Life brought exuberantly fresh elements to the Rockefeller Center design repertoire. These included the outdoor plaza’s pavement, which boldly drew on the Avenue of the Americas vibe with serpentine bands of white and gray terrazzo inspired by Brazil’s Copacabana Beach promenade. In finely polished form, these bands snake indoors across a lobby dominated by four elevator banks, each wrapped in burnished stainless steel panels that rise 16 feet from the floor to the dark red glass ceiling. Summing up the lobby as worthy of official landmark status—which it duly received in 2002—the Landmarks Preservation Commission cited it as “one of the most striking interiors in New York City.”

THE SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES special advertisement section for October 25, 1959, was a modernist showpiece of shape and color (above).

A VIEW OF the north lobby shows how the rightangled shapes on the ceiling, service core, and Fritz Glarner’s mural play against the swirling terrazzo floor to create dynamic movement. As the 2002 Landmarks Preservation Commission report notes, “To further accentuate this, the direction of the brushed finish in each panel alternates between horizontal and vertical” (right).

TWO MASSIVE PIECES of abstract art solidify the lobby’s triumph as a modernist gem. The east side of the lobby boasts a 40 feet by 15 feet rectilinear mural by Swiss artist Fritz Glarner, Relational Painting #88 (left, top and bottom). At the west end of the lobby, Portals—a 42 feet by 14 feet work of nickel, bronze, and glass by German artist Josef Albers—is affixed to the marble wall (right, top and bottom).

As uniquely new as its lobby is, the Time & Life Building apes its predecessors with features such as a sub-basement 40 feet down, accessible to trucks via ramp and elevator for easy off-street deliveries and removals. One level up, it has its own extension of the complex’s pioneering retail and pedestrian concourse. In this case, the concourse permits direct underground access from the lobby to the subway line beneath the avenue. There, Rockefeller Center Inc. made a bold move, agreeing in 1958 to pay the MTA $2 million to lease the northern end of the station’s mezzanine and give the raw space a modernist makeover, adding shops and throwing in cleaning and maintenance of the space for 20 years. For tenants, the new link became a popular perk. Meanwhile, the New York Times credited the rent paid to the transit authority with “saving” the city from a hike on the 15-cent subway fare. Paying off in less tangible ways was the design’s fealty to other Rockefeller Center traditions, including sizeable expanses of public space and the prominent use of modern art. The original complex had 3½ acres of landscaped gardens on its roofs and elsewhere, including the Channel Gardens and the trees ringing its sunken plaza. Time & Life had substantial setbacks from the property line that left a quarter of the plot wide open. This allowed for a 70-foot-deep plaza with shallow pools and mushroom fountains fronting Sixth Avenue and a 30-foot-deep promenade along West 50th Street.

CONCEIVED BY FRANCIS BRENNAN, a Fortune magazine art director, this installation is a 1-ton sculptural homage in bronze to a favorite Fortune typeface, Caslon 471. Brennan explained that “the sculpture is symbolic of the basic working tool of Time Inc.—the letters of the alphabet. And there is nothing more beautiful than a tool” (above).

AERIAL VIEW OF the plaza and promenade where they converge at Avenue of the Americas and 50th Street, 1960 (right).