The nearly complete tower packs a true diversity of programs onto a challenging site and earns its place among Midtown’s most iconic silhouettes.
“Architects and developers are often guilty of overusing the term mixed-use,” writes journalist Leopoldo Villardi in a four-page spread in Architectural Record, “but the program of 520 Fifth Avenue indeed justifies it.” The piece details the project’s origin story from a KPF feasibility study to a successful collaboration with developer Rabina Properties and explains how the mixed-use typology was a central draw for the firm and a defining measure of the project’s ambition. Villardi commends the design for “packing the slender, arch-laden tower with a four-story social club, residential amenities, and retail alongside 25 levels of leasable office space and 37 floors of apartments—all on a site that, at 10,625 square feet, isn’t much larger than three side-by-side tennis courts.”
The tower’s spiraling setbacks are as much a product of zoning performance as of design intention, the article relays. The corkscrew of stepped terraces allows for wider, more flexible lower office floors while scaling down to more intimate residential floor plates above. The façade, clad in beige terra cotta and fluted metal at its base and color-matched aluminum above, wraps the tower in a modular system of arches that KPF President James von Klemperer describes as “an inherently humane form,” simultaneously contemporary in construction and rooted in the historic Midtown context.
As 520 Fifth Avenue approaches its summer 2026 completion and KPF celebrates its 50th anniversary, Architectural Record highlights the project as a commercial success and as a signal of KPF’s evolving design direction. “More broadly, the professional pendulum has swung away from all-glass towers, and that’s something that we have been part of in a way,” reflects Jamie in the article. “We realized that cities benefit more from this kind of surface—when buildings aren’t just mirrors, but give something back.”
