The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice (also known as 320 East 43rd Street, 321 East 42nd Street, or the Ford Foundation Building) is a 12-story office building in East Midtown Manhattan, New York City, United States. Completed in 1967, it was designed in the late modernist style by architect Kevin Roche and engineering partner John Dinkeloo of Roche-Dinkeloo. The building was commissioned as the headquarters of the Ford Foundation, the largest private foundation in the United States when the edifice was constructed.
The building is a glass-and-steel cube held up by piers made of concrete, clad with Dakota granite. The main entrance is along 43rd Street, and there is a secondary entrance on 42nd Street. Dan Kiley was the landscape architect for the large public atrium inside, the first such space in an office building in Manhattan; it includes trees, shrubs, vines, and other plants. Most of the building's offices are north and west of the atrium and are visible from other offices.
Commissioned after Henry Heald became the Ford Foundation's president, the structure was developed on the former site of the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled. Final plans for the Ford Foundation Building were announced in September 1964, and the building was formally dedicated on December 8, 1967. The building underwent a major renovation and restoration between 2015 and 2018, and it was renamed the "Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice". The structure received critical acclaim for its design following both completion and renovation, and the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission has designated the building and its atrium as city landmarks.
Site
The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice is on the south side of 43rd Street in East Midtown Manhattan, New York City, United States. The building is in the middle of the block between First Avenue to the east and Second Avenue to the west. The main entrance is to the north, with an address of 320 East 43rd Street, and it also has an address to the south, at 321 East 42nd Street. The site measures , of which the building occupies . The Hospital for Ruptured and Crippled Children (now the Hospital for Special Surgery) had once occupied the plot.
The building, less than one block west of the headquarters of the United Nations, is surrounded by the Tudor City development. The Church of the Covenant is immediately across 42nd Street to the south, and the Daily News Building is diagonally across 42nd Street and Second Avenue to the southwest. The Beaux-Arts Institute of Design and Beaux-Arts Apartments are one block north.
43rd Street is a one-way street sloping down from Tudor City to the rest of the Manhattan grid. Because of the street grid of the area, vehicles traveling to the building must travel east on 41st Street from Second Avenue, turn onto Tudor City Plaza (which crosses 42nd Street), and then turn again onto 43rd Street. This creates a scenic approach for the main entrance while allowing a partial view of the building's atrium from both Tudor City Place and 43rd Street. The approach was intended to be reminiscent of a rural setting, and one architectural critic described it as "not an accident but conscious contrivance". Due to the topography, the 43rd Street entrance leads to the second floor, and the rear entrance on 42nd Street leads to the first floor. On both 42nd and 43rd Streets, the spaces between the lot lines and the facades are paved with red-brown brick.
Architecture The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice is 12 stories high and reaches . It was designed by Eero Saarinen Associates (renamed Roche-Dinkeloo in 1966), composed of Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, who took over the firm after its namesake, their former boss Eero Saarinen, died in 1961. Roche was involved primarily in design, while Dinkeloo oversaw the construction. Turner Construction was the contractor for the building. Cosentini Associates were the mechanical engineers, Severud Associates were the structural engineers, Michael J. Kodaras was the acoustic consultant, and Warren Platner was the interior-design adviser; Eugene Festa and Philip Kinsella were also hired to advise on the design. In a 1988 book, the historians Richard Berenholtz and Donald Reynolds wrote that the building was, stylistically, "a thematic descendant of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-Chinois garden and of the Victorian conservatory".
The building is set back about behind the lot line. Its 12-story height was chosen because that was the same height as the second-lowest setback on the adjacent office tower on 42nd Street. The design was intended to highlight the Ford Foundation Building as the eastern terminus of the succession of commercial structures along 42nd Street's northern sidewalk. including diagrams. The building could have been built up to times its ultimate size, thus providing more office space that could be rented. Zoning regulations allowed the building to rise as much as before a setback was required. The building's developer, the Ford Foundation, wanted it to be at a relatively low height as "a public gesture". Roche also wanted the building to be a main part of what author Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen called a "larger urban context".
Facade
The facade includes concrete piers and walls, which are used primarily in support structures. The concrete is covered with gray-pink or mahogany South Dakota granite, supplied by the John Swenson Granite Company of New Hampshire. There are three granite piers, oriented northwest–southeast at a 45-degree angle to the street, which were intended to give visitors the impression that they were "partially in the building" even before entering. The facade also uses Cor-Ten steel, particularly in sections of the building that overhang other spaces. The steel was allowed to weather to a deep tan color. Although the designers had originally intended to use reinforced concrete, the high cost of that material prompted them to use Cor-Ten steel; at the time, the city's fire-safety codes did not allow the use of exposed structural steel. Interspersed between the steel beams are 60,000 glass panes, which cover . These materials were said to "harmonize" with Tudor City's red-brick facades; although Roche criticized Tudor City as "a phony piece of stage-set architecture", he still perceived the setting as "a fairly nice character".
The southern elevation is on 42nd Street. The western part of this elevation is a windowless granite slab. The eastern portion consists of two large granite piers: one at the center of the facade and one at the southeastern corner. On the eastern section of the facade, the first through tenth stories have a recessed glass wall; the eleventh and twelfth stories are recessed at a lesser depth and are carried over this recess by a glass-walled enclosure with an I-beam on top. The twelfth story protrudes further out than the eleventh story, and a catwalk hangs underneath the eleventh story. An entrance with a revolving door is between the two diagonal piers, and there is another set of doors in the space between the center pier and the western section of the facade. , the 42nd Street entrance was closed to the public.
The eastern elevation faces Tudor City. It is similar to the 42nd Street elevation in that the northern section is clad with granite; the southern section is a recessed glass wall. There is a diagonally oriented pier in the center of the eastern elevation. The southeast-corner pier does not face onto the eastern elevation. The eleventh and twelfth floors, as well as the catwalk, are also recessed to a lesser extent than the first through tenth floors.
The northern elevation is on 43rd Street. The easternmost part of the facade is a windowless granite slab. The rest of the facade is composed of glass-walled offices between four narrow granite piers that divide the windows into three vertical bays. The second-floor entrance is recessed significantly inward, creating a brick-paved porte-cochère behind the four piers. There are two brass double doors at this entrance. The third and fourth stories are recessed as well, but at a progressively smaller scale, and the eleventh and twelfth stories are also slightly recessed. The setbacks on this elevation were designed to reflect the terraced garden inside.
The western elevation faces a private driveway. It is faced with granite, with a narrow bay of windows and two wider window bays from north to south. This private driveway also has brick pavers, a loading dock, and garage and service entrances. When the building was completed, the color of the granite blended in almost completely with the adjacent buildings, as seen from Second Avenue.
Interior The Ford Foundation Building is built around a public atrium with a square floor plan and a ceiling. The garden inside the atrium was designed by Dan Kiley, one of Saarinen's frequent collaborators. The atrium occupies much of the building's southern and eastern elevations. Above ground level, most of the upper stories are composed of narrow wings on the northern and western sides of the atrium, arranged similarly to Spanish buildings with interior courtyards. These wings measure wide, facing either the atrium or the street. The eleventh and twelfth floors are suspended from a pair of girders and overhang the lower floors and the atrium. Unlike the lower floors, they have open plan workspaces on all four sides, surrounding square openings at their centers. The interiors cover , of which can be used as offices.
Warren Platner designed the interior spaces. The parquet floors are made of white oak, interspersed with raised floor tiles made of ceramic. Almost every decorative metal piece in the building was originally made of brass; marble drinking fountains and linen wall coverings were also used. Other decorations were made of natural materials, including wool rugs inset into the oak flooring, as well as furniture made of leather and mahogany. The original custom-designed furniture was costly; the chairs for the Ford Foundation's directors each cost $500, and the smallest mahogany desks were $700. The building also included works of art, including lithographs from Old Masters, when it opened.
Atrium
The atrium is open to the public during the daytime and is free to visit. The garden contains several tiers sloping up from 42nd to 43rd Street, with an elevation change of . The atrium is more easily accessed from 42nd Street; the building's lobby is closer to 43rd Street. At the building's northwest corner, the lobby links with several elevator banks. A stair within the atrium's western section ascends to the lobby. There are also several smaller stairs and ramps. A wheelchair lift at the atrium's southeast corner connects the garden's tiers. The floor pavers are oriented west–east and are made of brick. Iron bars, resembling the facade's Cor-Ten steel beams, are embedded in the pavement.
As originally arranged, the atrium had 18 aquatic plants, 37 trees, 148 vines, 999 shrubs, and 22,000 ground cover plants. These were planted within of topsoil. Kiley primarily selected woodland plants that could survive the atrium's highly variable humidity, which ranged from 10% in the winter to 50% in the summer. There were also 250 movable pots with flowers in different colors, which were rotated out fortnightly. The plantings were arranged in and around a central square fountain; coins thrown into the fountain were used to help finance the atrium's upkeep. Kiley transported some eucalyptus plants from California in the ultimately unrealized expectation that they would grow to , thereby providing shade for the upper-story offices. The soil they are planted in rests atop a fiberglass membrane and layers of gravel and rocks.