Project of the Year - Mixed Use

One Beacon Court at 731 Lexington Avenue

Noted for being a "truly mixed-use building," One Beacon Court at 731 Lexington Ave. won honors for how it overcame major challenges, including a complete design overhaul early in the project. The building also made the jury's short list for the overall Project of the Year.

The 1.4-million-sq.-ft. tower occupies a city block bounded by East 58th and East 59th streets and Lexington and Third avenues in Manhattan. The 815-ft. building has office, retail, and residential condominium sections, with initial occupancy expected before year's end. Final completion will be in mid-2005.

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The $450 million building features 105 luxury condos on upper floors of a 55-story tower with views of Central Park. The anchor tenant, Bloomberg LP, will use 700,000 sq. ft. to house its new headquarters and nearly 4,000 of its employees. The property will also have another 180,000 sq. ft. of rentable office space.

"Structurally, it was an enormous challenge," one jury member said, recognizing a major detour during the project. Originally, the design consisted of an 860-ft. reinforced-concrete tower on the Third Avenue side of the site for residential and commercial use, along with a hotel from the 10th to 22nd floors. The west side of the site would have consisted of an eight-story structural steel podium with concrete-on-metal deck.

But anchor tenant Bloomberg expanded its original space request for the new headquarters. The changes required revisions to the entire structural plan, including moving the tower over to the Lexington Avenue side and eliminating the hotel plans entirely. The revised structural design resulted in a frame of 22,000 tons of steel with concrete and metal deck to the 29th floor, and a tower of 15,000 cu. yds. of concrete and 1,900 tons of rebar for the residential floors.

The site plan changes came after the team had poured the original foundation and excavated 160,000 cu. yds. of rock. The team redesigned the foundation to address the new design loads from what was a primarily concrete structure located on Third Avenue to one that was now steel and concrete and shifted to Lexington Avenue.

The development features two towers, one a slender lateral system, and the second a 10-story building connected to the first tower through the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors but separated by a unique seven-story atrium.

The low- and mid-rise commercial component of the building has a steel frame up to the 30th floor. The tower is concrete from the 30th floor up to the 55th floor. A tuned mass damper shifts the building's weight in order to reduce wind-induced motion.

Site logistics played a key role in the project. With the entire site bounded by busy streets and approaches to the 59th Street Bridge, the team had to expedite material deliveries while erecting steel and deploying hoists from multiple locations. It fitted the ground-level retail areas with additional structural reinforcements to accommodate truck deliveries, keeping most within the site confines. The team also built a sidewalk bridge across 58th Street adjacent to a multihoist tower servicing all floors. That bridge also protected the street below during erection and dismantling of the hoist complex.

The owner's schedule required advancing the steel contract award before the design was done. Bovis Lend Lease LMB, the construction manager, helped keep the project on track by dividing the task into phases, with each portion set on a schedule agreed to by the major project players. It then wrote that schedule into the steel trade contract, leading the steel contractor to place orders and start fabrication for early phases while design on other phases was progressing.

The building has three levels below grade with a total of 220,000 sq. ft. of mixed-use space and a total depth of 65 ft. The third lowest level will contain truck docks, mechanical, and storage areas; while the second lower level will belong to Bloomberg. Home Depot has leased the first basement level, while retail tenants such as H&M, Wachovia Bank, and the Bank of America have leased space in the ground and second floors. To expedite leasing, the project team designed and placed HVAC systems on the eighth and ninth floors first in order to allow for early occupancy while continuing construction on upper portions of the building.

The exterior façade is a glass and metal curtain-wall system beginning on the third floor with stainless steel finishes through the sixth floor and painted aluminum up through the tower. The curtain wall has extruded fins extending 13 ft. off the window face and various other horizontal fins and vertical metal detail features. The Lexington drive-through is also a stainless steel and glass structure with skylights and a standing-seam metal roof.