Location: New York City, United States.

Architect: RB Systems.

The 265 West 45th Street tower in Midtown Manhattan is a super-slim high-performance tower that rises to 400m in height. The tower is located on a small, currently vacant site on West 45th St, which measures approximately 30x30m. The tower provides modern, ergonomic, sustainable office spaces for multi-floor corporate tenants. The tower utilizes an innovative structural system that solely determines its appearance. Due to the extremely constrained site, the choice was to eliminate perimeter columns and substitute them with a set of steel cables, which run and twist along the height of the tower, allowing for an ultralight, yet sturdy structural assembly. The tower is also abstract and aligns with technology-oriented aesthetics. The goal was to design the block’s centerpiece, which by its alien-like appearance, would contribute to the extremely diverse, charging, energetic, and ever-progressing built environment of New York. One of the most distinctive features of the design is the “Halo” canopy, a toroid volume soaring above the entrance plaza. The tower’s entrance lobby greets visitors with an austere multi-story space, which is a first glimpse into very modern, technology-driven interiors of the tower. The tower’s furniture was also engineered to fit the space precisely, with ergonomic, sit-stand transformable furniture. Due to the extremely dense spatial arrangement of the tower, a solution for locating a multi-ton tuned mass damper had to be non-trivial. The idea was to design a toroidal damper, which will not take up space directly on top of the core, to leave it free to locate elevator overruns and to provide continuity of evacuation paths such as stairs inside of the core.