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General Electric Building

architect	Cross & Cross
location	570 Lexington Avenue at 51^st St.
date	1929-1931
style	Art Deco
construction	194,6m / 640.0ft, 50 floors salmon brick, terra-cotta The base is of rose-coloured granite, while the set-back mass above and the tower shaft are clad in glazed tan brick. The undoubtedly most striking feature of this 195 m tall building is its, indeed, flamboyant top, a curious mixture of Gothic spires in limestone and brickwork with wavy, filigree style decoration and lightning bolt motifs, depicting the electricity of radio transmission waves sent by the Radio Corporation of America. At night this "crown" of the building is illuminated from within, making the top look like a giant torch. The entrance lobby has a vaulted ceiling of aluminium plating with sunburst motifs and walls of light pink marble. The lamp fixtures are of aquamarine-colored glass.
type	Office Building

The General Electric Building is a historic 50-floor skyscraper in Midtown New York City, United States, at 570 Lexington Avenue (southwest corner of Lexington and 51st Street). Originally known as the "RCA Victor Building" when designed by Cross and Cross in 1931, and sometimes known by its address to avoid confusion with the later GE Building at 30 Rockefeller Center.

It backs up to the low Byzantine dome of St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue and shares the same salmon brick color. But from Lexington, the building is an insistently tall 50-floor stylized Gothic tower with its own identity, a classic Art Deco visual statement of suggested power through simplification. The base contains elaborate, generous masonry, architectural figural sculpture, and at on the corner above the main entrance, a conspicuous corner clock with the curvy GE logo and a pair of silver disembodied forearms. The crown of the building is a dynamic-looking burst of Gothic tracery, which is supposed to represent radio waves, and is lit from within at night.

Chanin Building

architect	Sloan & Robertson (René Chambellan and Jacques L. Delamarre for the lobby and the ornementation)
location	122 East 42^nd Street (southwest corner of Lexington Avenue)
date	1927-1929
style	Art Deco
construction	Steel frame. 56 floors, 207m (680 feet) high. Cost: $14,000,000 The steel frame is clad in buff brick and terra cotta and it is set back in conformance with the 1916 Zoning Law. The facade illustrates the introduction of colored glass, stone and metal on the exterior of tall buildings. Materials such as bronze, Belgian marble and terra-cotta are used here in an inventive and exuberant way.
type	Office Building

The Chanin Building is a skyscraper located at 122 East 42nd Street in New York City. Built by Irwin S. Chanin in 1929, it is 56 stories high, reaching 197.8 metres excluding the spire (207.3 metres/680 feet including spire). It was designed by Sloan & Robertson in the Art Deco style, [1] and incorporates architectural sculpture by Rene Paul Chambellan. When originally completed, the 50th floor had a silver-and-black high-brow movie theater. This floor and the 51st are now offices joined by a stairwell instead. Initially a dominant landmark in the midtown skyline, the building had an open air observatory on the 54th floor. [2] Having been surpassed in height by a number of buildings, most notably, the Chrysler Building located across the street, the observatory has been long closed.

Chrysler Building

architect	William Van Alen
location	405 Lexington Avenue at 42^nd Street
date	1928-1930
style	Art Deco
construction	77 floors, 319.5m (1048 feet) high, 29961 tons of steel, 3,826,000 bricks, near 5000 windows. Cost: $ 20,000,000 The building is clad in white brick and dark gray brickwork is used as horizontal decoration to enhance the window rows. The eccentric crescent-shaped steps of the spire (spire scaffolding) were made of stainless steel (or rather, similar nirosta chrome-nickel steel) as a stylized sunburst motif, and underneath it steel gargoyles, depicting American eagles (image), stare over the city. Sculptures modeled after Chrysler automobile radiator caps (image) decorate the lower setbacks, along with ornaments of car wheels. The three storeys high, upwards tapering entrance lobby has a triangular form, with entrances from three sides, Lexington Avenue, 42nd and 43rd Streets. The lobby is lavishly decorated with Red Moroccan marble walls, sienna-coloured floor and onyx, blue marble and steel in Art Deco compositions. The ceiling murals, painted by Edward Trumbull, praise the modern-day technical progress -- and of course the building itself and its builders at work. The lobby was refurbished in 1978 by JCS Design Assocs. and Joseph Pell Lombardi.
type	Office Building
	Click here for Chrysler Building gallery

Rockefeller Center

architect	Associated Architects
location	30 Rockefeller Plaza, bet W50 and W51. West 48^th to 51^st Streets between 5^th and 6^th Avenues
date	1931-1933
style	Art Deco
construction	Steel frame with limestone cladding
type	Office Building
	see also GE Building, originally RCA Building

Rockefeller Center is a complex of 19 commercial buildings covering 22 acres between 48th and 51st Streets in New York City. Built by the Rockefeller family, it is located in the center of Midtown Manhattan, spanning between Fifth Avenue and Seventh Avenue. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987. It is the largest privately held complex of its kind in the world, and an international symbol of modernist architectural style blended with capitalism.

GE Building, originally RCA Building

architect	Raymond Hood
location	30 Rockefeller Plaza, bet W49 and W50
date	1933
style	Art Deco
construction
type	Office Building
	see also Rockefeller Center

The GE Building is an Art Deco skyscraper that forms the centerpiece of the Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan. Known as the RCA Building until 1988, it is famous for housing the headquarters of the television network NBC. At 850 feet (259 meters) tall, the 70-story building is the 8th tallest building in New York City and the 32nd tallest in the United States. The building is sometimes referred to as 30 Rock, a reference to its address at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

Empire State Building

architect	Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, William F. Lamb as chief designer
location	350 Fifth Ave., bet. W33 and W34
date	1930-1931
style	Art Deco
construction	Steel frame 102 floors, 1252 feet, 381 meters high. Effective use of setbacks to emphasize tower. The building is clad in Indiana limestone and granite, with the mullions lined in shiny aluminium. There are in all 6,500 windows, with spandrels sandblasted to blend their tone to that of the windows, visually creating the vertical striping on the facade. The windows and spandrels are also flush with the limestone facing, an aesthetic and economic decision.
type	Office Building
	Click here for an Empire State Building gallery

The Empire State Building is a 102-story Art Deco skyscraper in New York City, New York at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street. Its name is derived from the nickname for the state of New York. It stood as the world's tallest building for more than forty years, from its completion in 1931 until construction of the World Trade Center's North Tower was completed in 1972. Following the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, the Empire State Building became for the second time, the tallest building in New York City.

The Empire State Building has been named by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. The building and its street floor interior are designated landmarks of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, and confirmed by the New York City Board of Estimate. It was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1986. In 2007, it was ranked number one on the List of America's Favorite Architecture according to the AIA. The building is owned by Harold Helmsley's company and managed by its management/leasing division Helmsley-Spear.

Westin Hotel

architect	Arquitectonica
location	43rd Street and Eighth Avenue
date	2002
style	Post-Modernism
construction	glass curtain wall
type	Hotel

The redevelopment of Times Square has finally produced a building worth talking about: the new Westin Hotel on Eighth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets. And people are talking about it for a welcome reason. The Westin has raised a flag over the issue of taste. Translation: many people find it ugly. Hideous. The very embodiment of beauty's evil twin.

Look up, people. This is New York. We live in one great ugly town. Not being too hung up on beauty is what makes life here possible, even thrilling. In exchange for surrendering refinement, we get a kind of urban poetry that is the envy of the world. Sometimes it takes outsiders to see it. Often, outsiders introduce new rhymes. The beauty resides, in some sense, in staying an outsider. The Westin is the consummate outsider's hotel.

THE BUSH TOWER

architect	Helmle & Corbett
location	130 W 42nd St
date	1916-1918
style	Art Deco Gothic
construction	The building site is only 15 m wide and 27.5 m deep, and the architects remarked that they wanted to make the building "a model for the tall, narrow building in the center of a city block." And it was regarded as such for the next decade of feverish urban construction. The style of the building follows the "traditional" early skyscraper style with its Gothic appearance -- English this time. On the side facaces, trompe l'oeil brickwork creates vertical "ribs" with a fake "shade" pattern to enhance the verticality. The windows are concentrated to the north and south facades, as well as to a recessed mid-facade light-well on the east facade.
type	Office Building

THE NARROW 32-story Bush Tower was the first skyscraper built after the Zoning Code of 1916, but it had been designed before the code went into effect. Nonetheless, Harvey Wiley Corbett accurately foresaw how architects would respond to the new setback envelope presented by the code.

Time Warner Center

architect	David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP
location	10 Columbus Circle
date	2003
style	Late Modern (International Style III)
construction	Height: 750 ft (229 m) Floors over ground: 55
type	Office Building

The Time Warner Center is a mixed-use skyscraper developed by The Related Companies in New York City. Its design, by David Childs and Mustafa Kemal Abadan of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, consists of two 229 m (750 ft) towers bridged by a multi-story atrium containing upscale retail shops. Construction began in November 2000, following the demolition of the New York Coliseum, and a topping-out ceremony was held on February 27, 2003. It is the property with the highest-listed market value in New York City, $1.1 billion in 2006.
Originally constructed as the "AOL Time Warner Center," the building surrounds half of Columbus Circle in Midtown Manhattan. The total floor area of 260,000 m² (2.8 million ft²) is divided between offices (notably the offices of Time Warner Inc.), residential condominiums, and the Mandarin Oriental hotel. The Shops at Columbus Circle is an upscale shopping mall located in a curving arcade at the base of the building, with a large Whole Foods Market grocery store in the basement. The complex is also home to a 1,200 seat theater for Jazz at Lincoln Center as well as CNN studios, from where Anderson Cooper 360° and Lou Dobbs Tonight, among other shows, are broadcast live. CNN's Jeanne Moos, known for her offbeat "man on the street" reporting, frequently accosts her interview subjects just outside the building. In 2005, Jazz at Lincoln Center announced a partnership with XM Satellite Radio which gave XM studio space at Frederick P. Rose Hall to broadcast both daily jazz programming and special events such as an Aartist Confidential show featuring Carlos Santana.

885 Third Ave Lipstick Building

architect	Philip Johnson & John Burgee
location	885 Third Ave., between East 53^rd and East 54^th Streets
date	1986
style	Post-Modernism
construction	The 143 m tall building consists of four oval-shaped cylinders placed above each other, each smaller in diameter than the one below, creating the building a set-back appearance. On the 36-storey facade, red granite spandrels alternate with the shiny steel of horizontal window bands. The elliptical lobby has a colonnade of steel-banded and round pillars along the glassed outer wall line, and the columns double on the outside, forming a narrow arcade there.
type	Office Building

The Lipstick Building is Johnson's second postmodern contribution to the Manhattan skyline, following his nearby AT&T Building two years earlier. This time the unusual shape, which has given the building its nickname, was a requirement of the developer, to make the building stand out and compensate for the less fashionable location of Third Avenue. The elliptical shape also claims to make all the exterior offices "corner" offices.