KPF leveraged urban analysis to design an iconic tower that contributes to the vibrancy of its context while satisfying stakeholder concerns.
How do you design a 1,401-foot-tall office tower to navigate New York City’s byzantine maze of regulations, zoning codes, and layers of public approval? For the KPF team behind One Vanderbilt, the answer was to use data to design a building four times as dense as what it replaced and twice as dense as what was allowed by right, ultimately improving how people experience the city.
Because the building’s link to Grand Central Terminal creates connections to Metro North, the Long Island Rail Road, and the Subway, the team studied how the tens of thousands of commuters disgorged into the area each day would interact with its ground plane. KPF’s Applied Technology team modelled how commuters would use pathways around the structure to determine that pedestrianizing Vanderbilt Avenue and angling the tower’s ground floor would save a total of 123,000 commute hours each year.
In New York City, where daylight is a precious commodity, it was vital to assuage concerns about the tower blotting out the sky. KPF leveraged its analysis to design One Vanderbilt’s cut-away form and steep taper, which yield a net increase in sky exposure at street level compared to the site’s previous building, which was 80% shorter but rose straight from the sidewalk with no setback. KPF paired sky exposure analysis with a spherical projection to give members of the public and elected officials a clear sense of how it would actually look to passersby. The resulting project allows the public to access its highest point via SUMMIT, becoming a beloved New York landmark and catalyst for the redevelopment of one of the city’s most dynamic districts, East Midtown.
