200 West Street, the new Goldman Sachs headquarters.
New York’s great financial institutions have traditionally seen architecture as a way of attracting notice. In 1960, when the Chase Manhattan Bank built a huge glass skyscraper in lower Manhattan, its name and logo were all over the building, and, just to make sure no one missed the point, it was given the official address of One Chase Manhattan Plaza. Chase was following the example of Bank of the Manhattan Company, which, in 1930, erected a building at 40 Wall Street, then the second-tallest skyscraper in the world, and of Bankers Trust, which was known for its pyramid-topped tower, a couple of blocks away.
Goldman Sachs, one of the largest and most profitable financial firms in the world, has a different view of things. Several thousand Goldman employees have just moved into a sleek steel-and-glass headquarters in lower Manhattan that is emphatically not called One Goldman Sachs Plaza. At 200 West Street, as the building is known, the name of the firm appears nowhere on the exterior, or in the lobby, or even on the uniforms of the security personnel or the badges given to visitors. Forty-three stories tall and two city blocks long, the Goldman building appears to have been designed in the hope of rendering the company invisible.
These days, it would be understandable if Goldman Sachs wanted to disappear: being the object of a suit by the Securities and Exchange Commission and, reportedly, of a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors is hardly conducive to the desire for a high profile. But this building, designed by Henry Cobb, of the firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, was planned long before the financial crisis, and before accusations were made that Goldman had bet against its own clients in the subprime-mortgage market. The design speaks less to Goldman’s current problems than to the firm’s long-standing obsession with being both extremely powerful and utterly inconspicuous.
Today, the idea that Goldman Sachs could operate with a low profile seems bizarre, even delusional. But for a long time it did. Its previous home, at 85 Broad Street, was a precast concrete tower, from 1983, one of the most forgettable tall buildings in New York. Having outgrown those premises, Goldman hired Cesar Pelli to build a glass tower in Jersey City, facing the Hudson River—finished in 2004, it’s the tallest and most elegant skyscraper in New Jersey—and laid plans for a new headquarters on the New York side, too. It fixed on a plot in Battery Park City, one block northwest of Ground Zero, which had been a parking lot for years. At the time, there was not a lot of development going on in lower Manhattan, and Goldman’s plans appear to have sent city and state officials into giddy ecstasy. They quickly agreed to give the company a hundred and fifteen million dollars in tax breaks and cash grants to build the new tower. More singular still, state and local governments decided to give the firm another big subsidy by letting it use $1.65 billion in tax-exempt Liberty Bonds, intended to stimulate economic development after 9/11, to cover part of the building’s $2.1-billion cost. Last month, Goldman announced that it had made a profit of nearly three and a half billion dollars in the first quarter of this year—enough to have paid for the entire building, in cash, in a couple of months, without any help from taxpayers.
It’s hard to keep such facts out of your mind as you look at the building. They don’t ultimately affect its qualities as a work of architecture, but it’s interesting how much of the firm’s calculating acumen comes across. Corporations dealing with architects often lack a sense of what they want to express. Should the building demonstrate power, modesty, or lavishness? Openness to new ideas or tradition and continuity? From the look of 200 West Street, Goldman knew exactly what it wanted; namely, to split all of these qualities right down the middle. The firm clearly aimed at a building that would appear modern but nowhere near the architectural cutting edge; neither cheap nor extravagant; and efficient without seeming merely functional. The result is a forty-three-story paradox: an understated palazzo.
Henry Cobb, whom Goldman hired after considering trendier candidates like Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, is a natural for a job like this, since he has spent a lot of his career—he is now eighty-four—being less visible than many of his peers, most notably his long-time collaborator I. M. Pei. The last skyscraper Cobb designed that might be considered cutting-edge was the austere John Hancock Tower, in Boston, which was finished more than thirty years ago and remains one of the most beautiful skyscrapers ever built. Cobb has a thoughtful, modest manner, and sometimes speaks so softly that you can barely hear him, but he has great determination—probably an attractive combination for Goldman.
The new headquarters is architecture as a well-tailored suit. From a distance, the building looks utterly unexceptional, but as you get closer your eye picks up signs of quality—the drape, as it were, and the stitching. Cobb’s façade of clear, colorless glass and bands of shiny steel is completely flat, and this two-dimensionality might have been dull were it not for the subtle shift of proportions in the quiet plaid pattern of the steel grid as it ascends. By the time you are close enough to touch this architectural garment, you can tell that a lot of money has been spent.
The building consists of a slab-shaped tower, which contains the firm’s offices, atop a much bulkier base, which contains six trading floors, each big enough to house nearly a thousand employees. From most angles, the tower looks rectilinear, except on the west, facing the Hudson River, where it bows out in a long, graceful curve. The firm insisted that the trading floors be as open as possible, so the architects used trusses to reduce the number of columns and pushed the elevators all the way to the north end of the building instead of running them up through the middle. The result is a lobby as large as an airport terminal, and, if you enter at the south end, an airport-like walk to the elevator. The lobby is austere, with plain limestone walls and no flourishes, but, to relieve the tedium of the long walk, Goldman commissioned two impressive abstract murals—an urgent and frenetic composition by Julie Mehretu, on the east side, and a blotchy and colorful one, by Franz Ackermann, on the west. Large windows allow a glimpse of the murals from the street, but this is as much of the building as the public will ever see. Goldman’s culture of secrecy has certainly saved it from offensive, Trump-style ostentation. By the same token, however, the building, unlike New York’s most admired business temples, will never mean much to people who don’t work in it.
Links to articles and Web-only features, in your inbox every Monday.
A weekly note from the New Yorker's cartoon editor.
More news, politics, culture, business, and technology:
Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (Revised January 7, 2009) and Privacy Policy (Revised January 7, 2009). The New Yorker © 2010 Condé Nast Digital. All rights reserved. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast Digital.
Read Full Article »