Disney’s New Downtown Headquarters Is All New York

Disney has arrived in Hudson Square in a shocking burst of good taste. Rather than entrust its corporate identity to Mickey, Donald & Belle, the company relied on Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which is not a trio of animated badgers but a global architecture firm. SOM, always an obvious choice for big developers, Middle Eastern governments, and growing universities, might seem less suited to a media juggernaut that, though surely as ruthless as any of those other clients, has also spent more than a century cranking out whimsy on an industrial scale. Zany isn’t in the firm’s repertoire, and it supplied Disney with a handsome, urbane, beautifully engineered cultural-production machine, making a statement by being better rather than different. The architects haven’t reached for a Wha? or a Wow! or an Oh! They’ve invited an admiring smile, possibly even a knowing nod. On all four sides of the full-block building, greenish columns line up along the sidewalk in sets of rippling triplets, drawing the eye upward to a subtly articulated green terra-cotta grid. With its rounded columns, recessed windows, and pointy corners, the surface has just enough depth to throw its own shadows, giving it a quality that so many contemporary buildings seem to shun: personality.

Seven Hudson Square — officially the Robert A. Iger Building — joins a long and distinguished list of addresses that have served to show off media brands and shape their New York neighborhoods. But it’s been a while. A ten-minute walk downtown, the 1860s cast-iron façade of the Harper & Brothers publishing house once dominated Franklin Square, and in 1890, the New York World moved into the city’s tallest building. More recently, Renzo Piano designed the New York Times Tower to project the paper’s coolness and transparency. Fox & Fowle’s Thomson Reuters Building, a few blocks away in Times Square, flaunted a digital sign above the street and a Cubist crown up top. Near Columbus Circle, Hearst hired Foster and Partners to erect one of the firm’s patented diagrid cages atop an Art Deco plinth. Across town, Bloomberg built itself a deluxe glass obelisk. And then, nothing; After that early-aughts boom, the media went architecturally quiet.

The entrance on Hudson Street.
Photo: Dave Burk/SOM

Disney too has left a lot of prints on America’s physical landscape. In the 1980s and early ’90s, it was a major force behind postmodernism, engaging architects who were serious about playfulness. The result is a portfolio that’s both goofy and monumental: Michael Graves’s Eisner Building (a.k.a. Team Disney), a work of chortling neoclassicism with a custard-yellow pediment carried on the shoulders of Happy, Sleepy, Grumpy, & Co.; Robert A.M. Stern’s Feature Animation Building in Burbank, where employees enter beneath a giant wizard’s hat; Arata Isozaki’s pastel-colored Disney Team Building in Orlando; Philip Johnson’s crowd of tall, skinny columns in Celebration, Florida. And long before the term postmodernism even existed, Disney had mastered the movement’s essential quality: the mashup of old and new, history and imagination. Even Cinderella’s extravagantly beturreted castle is an update of the neo-medieval Schloss Neuschwanstein, which King Ludwig II dreamed up in the 1870s to emulate a Wagner opera set. It is, as my wife, Ariella Budick, put it in the Financial Times, “a reproduction of a real place based on a fantastical evocation of a hoary myth.”

The building is less zany than businesslike. From left: Photo: Dave Burk/SOMPhoto: Dave Burk/SOM

The building is less zany than businesslike. From top: Photo: Dave Burk/SOMPhoto: Dave Burk/SOM

But the standard for the company’s New York aspirations was set by a more soberly designed fantasy furnace, the 2000 Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California, by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. (That’s the firm that brought us the all-glass cube of Apple’s Fifth Avenue store.) Partly, that’s because the East Coast side of Disney’s business is about not childhood fantasy but facts, sports, streaming, and tech. When I visited, I dropped in on one of the three basement soundstages, where The View’s co-hosts were earnestly debating the merits of the next Secretary of Education. That show has moved in, but most of the operation hasn’t yet: Upstairs on the sixth floor, a still-vacant newsroom awaits the staff of ABC News and its local affiliate WABC, and it could play a spy agency’s control center on TV. You know all those scenes where government agents murmur into phones or drum fingers on keyboards while giant screens carry simultaneous feeds from helmet cams, miniature drones, live maps, and unmarked vans? This room could do that. If SPECTRE ever knocks out power along the entire Eastern seaboard, the news teams could keep broadcasting uninterruptedly — and feeding themselves — for four days. (The building’s not all hard news: ESPN and Hulu live there, too.)

In California, Disney employees enter the office under Seven Dwarfs caryatids and Mickey’s wizard hat. From left: Photo: Heather Ikei/Courtesy of The Walt Disney Company.Photo: AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images/Getty Images

In California, Disney employees enter the office under Seven Dwarfs caryatids and Mickey’s wizard hat. From top: Photo: Heather Ikei/Courtesy of The W… more
In California, Disney employees enter the office under Seven Dwarfs caryatids and Mickey’s wizard hat. From top: Photo: Heather Ikei/Courtesy of The Walt Disney Company.Photo: AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images/Getty Images

Disney has plunked itself and its 1.2 million square feet of real estate in the middle of a distinctly un-gaudy neighborhood. In the 20th century, the area evolved into a hodgepodge of printing presses, candy companies, parking structures (including one that in the ’70s was repurposed into the gay disco Paradise Garage), and fume-hazed approaches to the Holland Tunnel. The buildings are mostly big and solid and serious — the exception being the glass sore thumb of the Dominick Hotel (formerly Trump Soho). To assemble the properties, Disney razed City Winery (which before that was another media center, the home of El Diario/La Prensa) and a full block of low-rise commercial buildings, but a 2013 rezoning precluded replacing them with a single glittering glass stalagmite. Instead, SOM produced two towers facing off across a ten-story valley, its bulk broken up by an assortment of setbacks and planted terraces. Squint, and it could almost be several buildings, slotted in among the neighborhood’s collection of rooftops and water tanks. Squint again, and you can detect the kinship with Central Park West’s double-towered Art Deco apartments, like the El Dorado.

The SOM team, led by Colin Koop, has even one-upped the competition in a citywide revival of a storied façade material: terra-cotta. The exterior’s thick, undulating frames faintly recall the glazed surfaces of a century ago and the cast-iron facades of Soho. There’s a whiff of nature in the city, too — rus in urbe — in the planted terraces (designed by SCAPE) and pine-green columns that come in clusters of three at the bottom, pairs above, and singly at the top, like a forest that thins as it approaches the tree line. The color adapts to the weather as the terra-cotta shifts from pale gray to dark brown depending on cloud cover and time of day. In some sections, terra-cotta drops away, ceding the façade to sections of matte-brass finials and glass with a soft sandstone hue. The palette and texture resonate with the neighborhood’s shades of weathered copper and ocher brick.

The terra-cotta façade anchors the design in one of New York’s great architectural traditions.
Photo: Dave Burk/SOM

All of which is to say that a company identified with sunny climes and what the critic Ada Louise Huxtable called “doctored reality” has bought itself some genuine New York architecture. The common thread is the intertwining of high-grade engineering and historical reference, in an iteration that doesn’t indulge in hyperrealistic fakery or honeyed nostalgia. It invites employees into high-grade office space with the usual airy lounges, reservable breakout rooms, and daily food temptations. The top-floor link between the two towers is a wide-open commons, daylit by angled skylights like an airborne factory floor. And wherever you look, there you are — not in some sanitized wonderland or gated suburban campus, but in an actual city — specifically, this gray-and-tan, slovenly, haphazard, congested, miraculous, but irreducibly real Manhattan. Three decades ago, when Times Square was being renovated, critics complained that the heart of sordidness had been stripped of authenticity and slathered in a layer of cloying cuteness — that it had been, in a word, Disneyfied. These days, in Hudson Square, Disney has been New Yorkified.

Photo: Dave Burk/SOM