375 Park Avenue ( Seagram Building )

375 Park Avenue ( Seagram Building )


SEAGRAM BUILDING

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375 Park Avenue
Designed in 1958 by the legendary Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Seagram Building is recognized as one of the world’s great architectural masterpieces.

375 Park Avenue is a 38-story trophy office building located on Park Avenue between 52 and 53 Streets in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. Famed for its design, details and building services the building contains more than 820,000 rentable square feet and has a long-established identity as one of the world’s finest office properties.

As one of a small group of “Class A+” office buildings in Manhattan, 375 Park has long been popular with financial service firms, law firms and Fortune 500 companies. There is 150-car parking garage in the concourse level, and the building is home to highly-acclaimed restaurants The Four Seasons and Brasserie.

Building Information
Constructed
1956-58
Architect
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,
Philip Johnson
Total SF
820,000
Floor Sizes
Floors 2-4: 39,000
Floors 5-10: 26,100
Floors 11-38: 15,700-18,200

NEW YORK, Jan. 23, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — RFR Realty LLC today announced that Arden Asset Management has signed a 17,500-square-foot full-floor lease renewal at 375 Park Avenue, also known as the Seagram Building. Founded in 1993 by Averell H. Mortimer, Arden Asset Management, which specializes in providing alternative investment solutions, including creating and managing portfolios of hedge funds using a research-driven investment process, has been a tenant in the landmark building since 2005 and agreed to renew its headquarters lease on the 32nd floor for an additional 10 years.
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140123/PH51721)
“The level of leasing activity at 375 Park Avenue for year-end 2013 totaled over 100,000 square feet, and that momentum has persisted into 2014,” said Steve Morrows, executive vice president and director of leasing at RFR Realty LLC, who represented the ownership in-house in the lease negotiations. “The commitment with Arden Asset Management is a testament to the building’s outstanding pedigree, as it houses some of the world’s finest private equity firms, hedge funds and family offices. In order to best serve these premier tenants, we will launch several building enhancements throughout the year, including a 375 Park Avenue Limited Edition Prebuilt Collection that will offer unique high-end designs tailored to the personality and identity of each tenant as well as an amenity space with a 10,000-square-foot terrace.”
The deal with Arden Asset Management comes on the heels of a new commitment with David Martinez-owned investment firm Fintech, which has been a tenant in the landmark building since 1994 and renewed its lease on the 38th floor for an additional 10 years.
Designed by noted architects Ludwig Miles van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, 375 Park Avenue was completed in 1958 and remains today one of the finest examples of the functionalist design aesthetic and a masterpiece of corporate modernism. Acquired by RFR in 2000, the building has since undergone a comprehensive capital improvements campaign, which included a broad elevated plaza along Park Avenue that features symmetrically designed fountains and landscaping, a 150-car parking garage with waiting lounge and two of Manhattan’s most exclusive restaurants: Four Seasons and Brasserie. 375 Park Avenue offers refined luxury office interiors with panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline coupled with 24/7 building access, convenient proximity to public transportation and a prestigious tenant roster that includes some of the world’s great financial powerhouses and Fortune 500 companies.
Arden Asset Management was represented in the lease negotiations by Brian Goldman, Neil Goldmacher and Erik Harris on Newmark Grubb Knight Frank.
About RFR
RFR is a fully integrated real estate investment firm based in New York City with a core focus on select urban markets in the United States and Germany. Founded by Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs in the early 1990’s, the firm has been an active force in the New York City and German real estate market for much of the past two decades. RFR’s portfolio has grown to include more than 100 properties located in select domestic and international markets. While its property portfolio is anchored in the Manhattan and key German commercial markets, RFR also has significant commercial, residential, hotel, and retail holdings. RFR has a proven track record of adding significant value to the properties it acquires through property-level repositioning and strategic financial engineering. RFR has created an organization with deep experience in all phases of the property life cycle and is positioned to take advantage of market opportunities.
Contact:
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Read more news from RFR Realty LLC.
SOURCE RFR Realty LLC

The Seagram Building is a skyscraper, located at 375 Park Avenue, between 52nd Street and 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The structure was designed by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe while the lobby and other internal aspects were designed by Philip Johnson[6] including The Four Seasons and Brasserie restaurants.[7]YouTube Severud Associates were the structural engineering consultants.
The building stands 515 feet (157 m) tall with 38 stories, and was completed in 1958. It stands as one of the finest examples of the functionalist aesthetic and a masterpiece of corporate modernism. It was designed as the headquarters for the Canadian distillers Joseph E. Seagram’s & Sons with the active interest of Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of Samuel Bronfman, Seagram’s CEO. It has the worst Energy Star rating of any building in New York, at 3 out of 100.

Architecture

This structure, and the International style in which it was built, had enormous influences on American architecture. One of the style’s characteristic traits was to express or articulate the structure of buildings externally.[9] It was a style that argued that the functional utility of the building’s structural elements when made visible, could supplant a formal decorative articulation; and more honestly converse with the public than any system of applied ornamentation. A building’s structural elements should be visible, Mies thought. The Seagram Building, like virtually all large buildings of the time, was built of a steel frame, from which non-structural glass walls were hung. Mies would have preferred the steel frame to be visible to all; however, American building codes required that all structural steel be covered in a fireproof material, usually concrete, because improperly protected steel columns or beams may soften and fail in confined fires.[10] Concrete hid the structure of the building — something Mies wanted to avoid at all costs — so Mies used non-structural bronze-toned I-beams to suggest structure instead. These are visible from the outside of the building, and run horizontally, like mullions, surrounding the large glass windows. This method of construction using an interior reinforced concrete shell to support a larger non-structural edifice has since become commonplace. As designed, the building used 1,500 tons of bronze in its construction.
External video
Smarthistory – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building
On completion, the construction costs of Seagram made it the world’s most expensive skyscraper at the time, due to the use of expensive, high-quality materials and lavish interior decoration including bronze, travertine, and marble. The interior was designed to assure cohesion with the external features, repeated in the glass and bronze furnishings and decorative scheme.
Another interesting feature of the Seagram Building is the window blinds. As was common with International style architects, Mies wanted the building to have a uniform appearance. One aspect of a façade which Mies disliked, was the disordered irregularity when window blinds are drawn. Inevitably, people using different windows will draw blinds to different heights, making the building appear disorganized. To reduce this disproportionate appearance, Mies specified window blinds which only operated in three positions – fully open, halfway open/closed, or fully closed.

Structure

The 38-story structure combines a steel moment frame and a steel and reinforced concrete core for lateral stiffness. The concrete core shear walls extend up to the 17th floor, and diagonal core bracing (shear trusses) extends to the 29th floor.
According to Severud Associates, the structural engineering consultants, it was the first tall building to use high strength bolted connections, the first tall building to combine a braced frame with a moment frame, one of the first tall buildings to use a vertical truss bracing system and the first tall building to employ a composite steel and concrete lateral frame.

Plaza

The Seagram Building and Lever House, which sits just across Park Avenue, set the architectural style for skyscrapers in New York for several decades. It appears as a simple bronze box, set back from Park Avenue by a large, open granite plaza. Mies intended to create an urban open space in front of the building, despite the luxuriousness of the idea, and it became a very popular gathering area indeed. In 1961, when New York City enacted a major revision to its 1916 Zoning Resolution, the nation’s first comprehensive Zoning Resolution, it offered incentives for developers to install “privately owned public spaces” which were meant to emulate that of the Seagram’s Building.
The Seagram Building’s plaza was also the site of a landmark planning study by William H. Whyte, the American sociologist. The film, Social Life of Small Urban Spaces,[15]YouTube produced in conjunction with the Municipal Art Society of New York, records the daily patterns of people socializing around the plaza. It shows how people actually use space, varying from the supposed intent of the architects.

Brasserie

The building is the location of Brasserie, designed by Diller + Scofidio.

Steinway & Sons factory

In 1859 A large 5-story piano factory was built on this same location by Steinway & Sons. The property was sold in 1906.

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