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A landmark of its time, the old Hearst Building has given way to a new 46-story tower that aims for several levels of innovation through its green construction, its distinctive diagrid design, and its preservation of historic features, even as they are transformed into a new use. As it moves toward completion next year, the new Hearst headquarters offers an interesting industry discussion piece.
When the Hearst Corp. built its six-story headquarters in 1928, the structure won acclaim for its design, architecture, and style. More than seven decades later, when the company decided to erect an office tower above the original building, the challenge was to make a mark for the 21st Century.
Although not slated for completion until June, the 46-story tower at 300 W. 57th St. is already attracting attention.
"It is already a landmark - you only have to stand on the street and gaze at it for a few minutes before you find yourself having conversations with passers-by who have something to say about the building,'' said Brandon Haw, senior partner with London-based Foster and Partners, the project's architect.
The highlight of the 856,000-sq.-ft. building is its "diagrid" structural system that creates a series of four-story triangles on the façade. The company was aiming for a distinctive look, said Brian Schwagerl, director of real estate and facilities planning for Hearst, which is consolidating employees from 10 locations around the city.
"We've been in this neighborhood for 80 years and will be for another 80 years, and beyond, so why not be sensitive to the neighborhood," he said. "We want people to say 'Wow' when they first see the tower."
Another highlight will be an $8 million "ice falls" that will greet visitors as they enter the building's four-story, 1.7-million-cu.-ft. lobby. Overall, Hearst is spending roughly $500 million on the construction effort. It declined to provide a total development cost.
"The idea is that this magnificent ice-falls feature will instantly make employees relaxed and contribute to a positive feeling when they come to work in the morning," said Joseph Byrne, project manager for New York-based Turner Construction, the construction manager on the project.
It's Green But Also Going for the Gold The Hearst building has many features that will help the new building qualify for the U.S. Green Building Council's gold, or second-highest, rating.
The environmentally friendly features include two 14,000-gallon reclamation tanks in the building's basement. Rainwater collected in the tanks will irrigate trees along the building's sidewalks, contribute to the tower's cooling systems, and provide the water for the ice falls. Other green elements are the lobby's extensive use of natural light, floors made from recycled materials, low-vapor paints, and low-toxicity, water-based sealants.
"The plans for the Hearst building are impressive," said Taryn Holowka, communications manager for the building council. "They came to us early in the process."
Though the concept of green building dates back to environmental efforts of the 1970s, the U.S. Green Building Council only developed its LEED rating system in 2000, giving buildings like Hearst's a chance to blaze a trail. While the cost to construct a green building is typically up to 7 percent higher, those additional costs can pay back in energy and other savings over the building's life, Holowka said.
The challenge for Hearst was pioneering some of the green features for a skyscraper design, said Bruce Phillips, managing director of New York-based Tishman Speyer, which was development manager for Hearst on the building.
"In terms of the green aspects of the building, the major challenge was understanding how to apply the standards to a large high-rise," Phillips said. "We were trying to analyze, design, buy, track, and document multiple aspects of the job in many cases without clear precedents and procedures in place."
They're Not Just Big Pretty Triangles
In addition to being distinctive, the diagrid structural system is allowing the building to use 20 percent less steel or 2,000 fewer tons. But the diagrid system's origins did not come from the potential steel savings or its look. Instead, it resulted from a need to provide more robust structural support for a design that placed the building core off center, said Ahmad Rahimian, president of WSP Cantor Seinuk, the structural engineer.
The core is toward the west, the only side that does not front a street. The other sides face 56th and 57th streets and Eighth Avenue.
"The load demand on the Eighth Avenue side was higher, so the diagrid was a response to the structural needs," Rahimian said. "It was an evolutionary process to come up with these solutions."
The diagrid itself starts at the 10th floor, about 110 ft. above ground, with each node of triangulated trusses spanning four stories, or 54 ft. high. The diagrid design, while used in other buildings, was unique here, Rahimian said, because it serves as the building's primary perimeter support system for the upper floors rather than a supplement to columns.
"It's an integrated network of triangulated elements wrapping around all four sides of the building," he said. "They operate as seismic, wind, and gravity supports. It's the most efficient way of addressing the lateral and gravity loads. And because you don't have any columns around the perimeter, you don't spend as much on steel as in a conventional structure."
The project team constructed the steel frame by holding individual columns at a proper angle with guy cables until a connecting beam could be put in place using bolted, rather than welded, connections.
The system appears more striking thanks to the glass curtain wall that appears to run the entire length of each triangle. Rahimian said the curtain wall is actually a standard system that connects at each floor using mullions, while the wide flange rolled steel diagrid members have stainless steel cladding as a face. The diagrid plan also results in unique "bird's mouth" corners to the building, which will allow some corner office-holders to be able to look directly down to the street below. The team was completing installation of the façade this summer.
The diagrid system connects at the 10th floor down into mega columns that connect into a new foundation dug under the existing building.
Founded on a Strong, Landmark Base The innovative skyscraper is anchored by a 74-ft.-high, six-story façade with a rich history steeped in culture and the arts. Originally known as the International Magazine Building, the six-story structure housed the 12 magazines owned by William Randolph Hearst in 1928.
The original design, by Joseph Urban and George P. Post & Sons, aimed to complement other music and arts buildings that had been planned for the area. Urban said the design was to convey that the building "houses industries whose purpose is to exert influence on the thought and education of the reading public."
The 40,000-sq.-ft. horseshoe-shaped building, which wrapped around a courtyard, was designed to accommodate an office tower atop it, but other than plans for nine additional stories sketched by George B. Post & Sons in 1946, which were not carried out, no further construction was proposed.
The building was designated a landmark site in 1988. It features fluted columns and carved balustrades on the first and second stories. The structure features six sculptural groups on the building's corners, the main entrance and on the entrance on Eighth Avenue and 57th Street. Those features include "Comedy and Tragedy," "Music and Art," "Sport and Industry" and "Printing and the Sciences."
Restoring the façade - precast limestone with a two-story base and four stories set back from the base - was nearly as large an effort as the building above, said Turner Construction's Byrne. The project required completely gutting the old building's interiors to create the foundation for the new skyscraper, added Cantor Seinuk's Rahimian.
"There were a series of challenges to stabilize the old façade which we did by selectively removing the structural members - using some of the old supports along with temporary lateral bracing to provide stability and coming back to remove those later on," he said.
The effort included a $2 million installation of blast-proof windows, an owner-requested feature which involved sand-blasting away decades of weather wear and pollution; raking out debris from all of the existing joints; restoring urns and figurines to the façade; and using a special coating system to weatherproof the stones of the façade.
The stonework cost roughly $3 million, while work to restore the building's main entrance cost $4.5 million, Byrne said. The project team also replaced dozens of pickets and handrails along the building's balconies.
Turner had to brace the original walls on the landmark to begin the complex process of demolishing the interior of the structure while also preparing to build atop the six-story base.
"We had no choice but to perfectly restore this beautiful façade while also making the original structure blastproof," Byrne said.
Hearst will also provide $8 million in improvements to a nearby subway station, including the installation of new stairways, repositioned features, and improved access for disabled riders. The city allowed the company to build four additional stories in exchange for the subway improvements. <<
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Hurst Casts Its Lobby in Plaster
By Tom Stabile
In having to preserve the façade of its landmark six-story 1928 building as it constructed a new skyscraper above it, the Hearst Corp. chose to recreate an old-style finish.
Instead of adding drywall to the interior of the old structure, which will serve as a multistory lobby and atrium for the company's new 46-story world headquarters, Hearst opted for lath and plaster, because it better matches the old façade.
"This is a new approach in how to build buildings in New York," said Brian Schwagerl, director of real estate and facilities planning for Hearst. "If you're going to build a building, why not build the best©"
While some developers and property owners in New York choose plaster for ceilings and special architectural features such as indoor sculptures, its use for interior walls is rare because of the significant cost difference between drywall installation and plaster wall construction.
Plaster walls, because of the specialized and more intensive labor they require, can cost up to $15 a sq. ft. more than drywall, said Arthur Doerner, president of Component Assembly Systems. The Pelham, N.Y., contractor is installing plaster, drywall, and acoustical walls for the entire 856,000-sq.-ft. building, which has a $500 million construction budget overall.
Doerner said 10 to 15 percent of New York City-area projects use plaster or plaster-like products, and usually only for smaller lobby or showpiece portions of their buildings. The Hearst building will have roughly 35,000 sq. ft. of plaster along three walls of the lobby-atrium.
"It's usually a smaller lobby, up to 10,000 sq. ft.," he said. "The Hearst project is unusually large."
Doerner said Hearst asked for the plaster in part because of the material's sturdier quality but also because it offered a way to match the landmark exterior.
"If you paint over Sheetrock, it's not going to look like 100-year-old limestone," he added.
Unlike drywall, the plasterers were able to create a special colored mix that matched the limestone, said Roque Taveras, Component's project manager on the Hearst tower.
"They wanted to get an engineered mix," he said. "They couldn't match the colors in the plant, so they're actually mixing it on site. Plaster lets you do that."
Thanks to that mixing effort, the three-coat, cement stucco plaster used on the Hearst project is more complicated to apply than the standard "scratch, brown, and smooth" layers of plaster normally applied onto sections of metal lath in a three-day cycle.
Another twist on the job was that the building's designers had a layer of drywall installed first against the façade, with the 8-ft.-tall self-furring metal lath sections screwed into the drywall. That's actually an unnecessary step, said John Coffey, a member of the New York-based Metallic Lathers and Reinforcing Ironworkers Local 46, who is on Component's team that was installing the metal lath over the summer on an eight-week schedule.
"You don't need Sheetrock as a backing," Coffey said. "They could have used paperback lath against the façade, and it actually would have worked better with the metal lath, with probably an even better fire rating. But I can understand the architects aren't familiar with plaster because it hasn't been used much in recent years for this type of job."
Coffey said he hopes that the Hearst project sparks imitators.
"They're really going the extra mile here to build a great project," he said. "You don't get a better product than plaster, and you'll get something that lasts forever."
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