Showing Steel
New Hearst Building to Use Innovative Steel Frame

The Hearst Corp., which has long played a role in American society, will now impact the New York City skyline with a $500 million, 42-story steel and glass tower at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street.

The Hearst story started in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire brought into being the splashy daily tabloid in American journalism. The Hearst chain of newspapers, at one point read by one in four Americans, played a major role in stirring up support for the Spanish American War in 1898.

Today, Hearst owns only 12 daily papers, but it has become the largest publisher of monthly magazines in the world. Among its better known titles are Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, both of which it has published for nearly a century, and the more recent O, The Oprah Magazine.

Hearst’s King Features Syndicate distributes some of the country’s most popular comic strips, including "Popeye," "Blondie" and "The Family Circus," along with advice columnists Dr. Joyce Brothers and Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Hearst owns 27 broadcast television stations that reach 17.5 percent of U.S. households, along with a number of popular cable networks including A&E, ESPN, Lifetime and the History Channel.

Still on the Corner

The new 856,000-sq.-ft. tower, when completed in 2006, will serve as the corporation’s world headquarters. The building at 959 Eighth Ave. has been designed by Lord Norman Foster of Foster and Partners in London, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect whose body of work includes renovation of the British Museum and the reconstruction of the Reichstag in Berlin. This is his first building in New York.

Foster’s design preserves the six-story façade of the landmark Hearst-owned building that now stands on the corner. From its hollowed-out core will rise a geodesic-like office tower featuring triangular steel bracing from the 10th floor up. It will have no vertical columns around the perimeter, creating corner views that are not possible in a typically framed building.

The steel framework will be a visible both inside the building and on the street. Referred to as the "diagrid" (a contraction of "diagonal grid") by those involved in the project, this perimeter will consist of 4-story-tall, grade-65 steel triangles prefabricated by the Cives Steel Co. at two plants, one in Gouverneur, N.Y., and the other in Winchester, Va. Cornell and Co. of Woodbury, N.J. will be the erector.

"Our buildings are designed to show how they’re put together," said Mike Jelliffe, project director for Foster and Partners. "We use steel because it’s a lot more flexible. Concrete has its place; we have done many concrete buildings as well. But in the environment of New York, steel is the obvious choice."

The Decision

Building its new headquarters at the site of its original New York headquarters was also an obvious choice. Hearst, which currently has 1,800 employees spread out in nine separate buildings in Midtown, had long ago outgrown its real estate.

"As leases were turning over we were reviewing several different options, which included renewing leases where we were, buying another property or developing one of several sites that we own, including 959 Eighth Ave.," said Brian Schwagerl, senior manager of facilities planning for Hearst. The Eighth Avenue site had several advantages, including its location on top of the Columbus Circle subway station, its proximity to Central Park just two blocks away, considerable air rights—and its history.

The old building was designed specifically for Hearst in 1927 by Joseph Urban and George B. Post & Sons. The original plan had been to eventually add 12 more stories to the base building. On the roof of the old building you can still see the stub-outs of the columns that were designed to carry the additional load.

The Depression intervened, and the additional stories were never built. In the meantime, the squat six-story building was designated a historic landmark. Four years ago Hearst asked Tishman Speyer Properties to do an analysis of the possibility of building on the site.

"We did a feasibility study, put together design and approval teams and oversaw the approval process," said Bruce Phillips, senior director of design and construction for Tishman Speyer.

Since the building had been landmarked, building on the site required approval from the Landmarks Commission, which allowed construction of the new building on the condition that the original façade be preserved. Because it is situated above the subway, the project also had to go through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure. In the end, in exchange for improvements to the subway station—including a new entrance, installing three elevators, repositioning turnstiles and adding and moving stairwells—Hearst was given a bonus of six floors to add onto the tower.

Phillips and his crew gave Hearst a list of possible architects. "Foster’s work on the Reichstag and the British Museum where he brought the old and new together attracted us," Schwagerl said.

Tishman Speyer has stayed on as development manager and will oversee the project until completion. The Cantor Seinuk Group Inc. quickly joined the team as structural engineer and Flack and Kurtz Inc. as mechanical engineer. Turner Construction Corp. is the construction manager.

The Diagrid

The unusual design of the building’s exoskeleton has meant a close working relationship between Foster’s team and structural engineer Ahmad Rahimian, executive vice president at Cantor Seinuk.

"Working with Cantor Seinuk, we developed this triangulated concept, this diagonal grid that breaks up the sides," Jelliffe said. "It’s a three-bay elevation to the east side and a four-bay elevation on the north and south sides. At the corners (because there are no vertical columns) we had the opportunity to create something special.

"We cut back the diagrid to form what we term the ‘birds’ mouths.’ They open up most of the floors and allow a much more panoramic view. So when you’re standing on those floor plates you’re not looking into corners, you’re looking into chamfers which open up the view."

Triangular bracing on the perimeter of a skyscraper is not new. It has been done before, most notably for the John Hancock Building in Chicago.

"What’s unique about this is that there is no column, no vertical element on the perimeter; it’s all triangulated," said Rahimian. "The triangular frames carry the gravity load. At the same time, the triangulation has inherent strength and resistance to the lateral loads, seismic and wind. …The triangulated shape means you don’t need any additional bracing and you don’t need to have any concrete walls in the building."

Because the triangles are so efficient in terms of bearing both the gravity and lateral loads, the building will use 21 percent less steel tonnage than a conventional building of its size.

The diagrid also allows for larger open floor plates, which Hearst considers important. Schwagerl said some of the older buildings in the neighborhood are beautiful, but "inside they not very helpful to us as we put out our magazines. These 22,000-sq.-ft. floor plates are designed to give us the open space we want."

The Old and the New

The diagrid begins at the 10th floor. From 10 down the building rests on raking mega-columns that allow for vast open spaces for the lobby, a cafeteria, meeting rooms and other public spaces.

"The tower loads are collected in a few locations with the mega-columns coming all the way down from the 10th floor to the foundation," Rahimian said.

None of the structural elements of the old building will remain; the new building will have its own foundation and new columns. Only the framing at the perimeter of the old building will remain to stabilize the existing landmark façade, and even that is being upgraded to meet current wind and seismic criteria.

"From the bottom to the 10th floor is one structure and from the 10th floor up, it’s framed entirely differently," said Ted Totten, president and general manager of Cives Steel Co.

"Considerable steel work will be required to reinforce the historic façade. The mega-column/mega-brace system up to the 10th floor consists of 44-in. square plate box weldments. Then from the 10th floor to the 42nd, the building changes to an exposed exterior diagrid column system. The wide flange diagonal columns and 10-in. plate connection nodes will require special fabrication and erection skills to interface the steel frame with the curtain wall system.," he added. "We will be field assembling the diagrid system in 4-story A frames, with the intermediate beams preinstalled to the columns, which will then be set in one piece."

"You enter through the existing arch (on Eighth Avenue) that is part of the landmark element and will be left well enough alone," said Jelliffe. "Then it opens up and you immediately see three escalators in front of you which take you up to the third floor level. Those escalators are set into a sloping water sculpture, which will cascade down past you as you’re going up."

The third to the seventh floors will be an atrium divided into different areas for different uses and enclosed in a skylight. "When you’re sitting in the cafeteria, you can look up through the skylight and see the tower soaring above on one side and you can see the existing landmark wall on the other," Jelliffe said.

Green and Secure

In addition to its innovative architectural and structural features, the new Hearst Building is being constructed with an eye toward attaining LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

"The efficiency of the steel frame of the building, which will resist wind and lateral forces with less tonnage, is an innovation worthy of note within the LEED system," Phillips said. "We’ve also developed some energy-efficient HVAC systems. For example, to heat and cool the giant atrium space we will be using spill air from the tower. That will allow us to provide most of the a.c. and heat from so-called waste air." In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Foster made some changes. The building’s core, rather than being in the center, has been positioned at the west side of the building away from any possible assaults from the street. (This offset core also allows for a larger footprint and more open space on the east side of the building.)

In addition, concrete block will be used to contain the stairways, which will be wider than in most pre-Sept. 11-office buildings.

Demolition of the old building began in May. The foundation work is scheduled to begin in October. Totten said the steel will start rising in February and should take about a year to complete.

"We spent the last hundred years on this corner; we hope to spend the next hundred, and beyond, here," Schwagerl said. "We are creating a building that will support the company through the next century."