You don’t understand Norman Foster’s JPMorgan Chase Tower for what it is

Tall buildings can be monuments to cities. Standing 423 meters high, 270 Park, The JPMorgan Chase Tower which was just inaugurated at the end of 2025, is an aggregation of narrow monolith-like sections arranged in a step formation. New York’s newest skyscraper is not only a monument to the city itself—its profile, the cityscape of Manhattan, gives away the ambition—it is also a microcosmic history of architecture.

Foster & Partner’s tower wasn’t understood for what it is. High triangular braces anchor the building to the ground, freeing up a maximum amount of urban public space up to a height of 24 meters. Foster and Partners learn from two iconic examples to achieve this in in refusing to build on the entire allocated plot: the elevated lobby of the Lever House by Gordon Bunshaft and the pedestal of the Seagram by Mies van der Rohe. All three architects understood very well that a monument needs a space recessed from the city from which to view it. In this case a whole city block, a rare opportunity in New York. 

The resulting effect, with the building recessed from the actual street, is that it stands out as a jewel. The lobby of this monumental addition to Midtown is a threshold to the urban grid and acts as a multi-function space that introduces the vertical city above. The lobby alone is the scale of a small museum. The attempt to attribute the lobby to this very typology is suggested by the large white marble staircase at its center. While the museum’s grand staircase usually leads to a neo-classical façade, here it is flanked by two monumental abstract paintings by German artist Gerhardt Richter and ultimately does not lead to more galleries but to elevator banks.

All around, areas reserved for gathering places function as publics spaces for socializing as a museum would. Instead of separating the museum from the city, 270 Park inserts it as a necessary introduction to the city beyond and above. Whereas the museum was inherited from the palace, the lobby of the 270 Park repurposes the museum typology to achieve a prostration to the skyscraper.

The reference to the typology of the museum is one indicator of Foster’s proposition of learning from architectural history. The citations are on the one hand erudite but also functional. The lobby, beyond showing that contrary to the museum, the skyscraper’s absolute invention is form, it also references the corporation-campus, the megastructure. Indeed, The JPMorgan Chase Tower is the new corporation-campus, the mega-skyscraper. It argues, against all architectural, ideological and cultural trends in a post-pandemic era, that the answer is once again density. 

Beyond liberating public space outside the entrance of the building, the triangular braces recall very specific examples of the brutalist postwar model of the corporation-campus. Occupying a previously underdeveloped site outside a city context, the campuses were a building methodology that could be applied to interconnected structures across a vast site. In the cases of projects studied by figures such as Paul Rudolph (the interior perspective drawings of the Burroughs-Wellcome Company Headquarters, which the recent Met exhibition shed a light on this period) theses brutalist megastructures proposed a densified version of the city as urban sprawl. 

It would seem paradoxical to the cite the 1970s brutalist megastructure as a predecessor of 270 Park, indeed Manhattan’s grid is already full of skyscrapers: the fact that the impetus for the masterplan of the megastructure was to create density where it was absent is well known. But the erection of 270 Park as a new hyper-density model takes its meaning and strength from yet another Park Avenue predecessor, the Met Life building. Connected to Grand Central, Met Life was to Flatiron—the first entire city-block building that learned from Haussmann’s plan2—what The JPMorgan Chase Tower is to Met Life: it builds upon the history of the typology to propose an accelerated and intensified form of density. 

The JP Morgan Chase Tower isn’t the first attempt to prove the historicity of the grid in relation to the future of the skyscraper. Rem Koolhaas’ Der Rotterdam was making this very statement. However the lack of context in relation to the actual city of Rotterdam, with few skyscrapers and much less density, could never achieve what 270 Park does in relation to Manhattan’s grid. Indeed, Fosters’ form literally condenses the city itself by stacking both vertically and horizontally.

In many ways the new skyscraper could be read more as a monument to the past city, and past ambitions, or so it would seem that this is the reason for its superficial dislike in journalism. Too nostalgic: its scale and ambition is no longer permitted in architectural culture and harks back to an earlier era, best represented by American corporate architecture such as Bunshaft, Pei, Mies, and British high-tech (of which Foster is the last remaining representative)

But the ingenuity of ways in which Foster builds upon the references suggests a new type of monument. Austrian art historian Riegl had described the monument as “a human creation erected for a specific purpose of keeping single human deeds or events alive in the minds of future generations.”4 270 Park does precisely this in relation to the architectures of Park avenue, but also in its vertical staking which evokes the iconic tips of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler building.

Yet it also does much more: the mega-skyscraper changes the city and declares its current density historical. 270 Park acknowledges that a new synthesizing form had to emerge in the architectural history of the skyscraper to condense the historically unprecedented complexity of the city. 270 Park is a mega-skyscraper, a new type of monument to architecture that is also a threshold to the future of the city. For the first time, architecture is at once the past and the future.

Opening image: © Nigel Young / Foster + Partners