Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice
Credits
The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice (also known as 321 East 42nd Street, 320 East 43rd Street, or the Ford Foundation Building) is a 12-story office building in East Midtown Manhattan in New York City. Designed by architect Kevin Roche and engineering partner John Dinkeloo in the late modernist style, the building was one of the first that Roche-Dinkeloo produced after they became heads of Eero Saarinen's firm.
The building is designed as a glass-and-steel cube held up by piers made of concrete and clad with Dakota granite. The main entrance is along 43rd Street. A second entrance on 42nd Street leads to a large public atrium, the first such space in an office building in Manhattan. The atrium contains landscaping from Dan Kiley and includes plants, shrubs, trees, and vines. Most of the building's offices are north and west of the atrium and are visible from other offices.
The building was commissioned for the Ford Foundation, then the largest private foundation in the United States, after Henry Heald became foundation president. The Ford Foundation Building was announced in 1963 and completed in 1968 on the former site of the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled. Between 2015 and 2018, the Ford Foundation Building underwent a major renovation and restoration project, and it was renamed the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice. The Ford Foundation Building has been critically acclaimed for its design, both after its completion and after the renovation. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building and its atrium as city landmarks in 1997.
Site
The Hospital for Ruptured and Crippled Children, formerly on the site
The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice is on the south side of 43rd Street, in the middle of the block between First Avenue to the east and Second Avenue to the west. It has addresses at 321 East 42nd Street to the south and 320 East 43rd Street to the north, although the 43rd Street entrance is the main entrance. The site measures 202 by 200 feet (62 by 61 m), of which the building occupies an area measuring 180 by 174 feet (55 by 53 m). The Hospital for Ruptured and Crippled Children (now the Hospital for Special Surgery) previously occupied the plot.
The building is less than one block west of the headquarters of the United Nations, and it 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. In addition, 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 eastward on 41st Street from Second Avenue, then 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. One architectural critic said that the complicated approach path was "not an accident but conscious contrivance". Kevin Roche, one of the architects, stated that the approach to the building was intended to be similar to that in a rural setting. Due to the topography, the 43rd Street entrance leads to the second floor, while the rear entrance on 42nd Street leads to the first floor. The spaces between the lot lines and the facades on 42nd and 43rd Streets contain red-brown brick pavers.
Architecture
The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice is 12 stories high and reaches 174 feet (53 m) or 180 feet (55 m). 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 Eero Saarinen died in 1961. Roche was involved primarily in design, while Dinkeloo oversaw the construction. Turner Construction was the contractor for the building. The interior space covers 415,000 square feet (38,600 m2). In a 1988 book, Richard Berenholtz 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 10 feet (3.0 m) 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. Roche stated that the building could have been built up to 2+1⁄2 times its ultimate size and thus have more office space that could be rented. In addition, zoning regulations allowed the building to rise up to 160 feet (49 m) before setting back. However, the building's developer 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".