NEW YORK | 15 Penn Plaza (Hotel Penn) | 1,050 FT / 315 M | 52 FLOORS

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Vornado’s Supertall ‘Penn 15’ By Foster + Partners Will Rise 1,200′ After Redesign, In Midtown Manhattan

Updated renderings created by DBOX for Vornado Realty Trust showcase The Penn District, a 7.4-million-square-foot development in Midtown, Manhattan. Located within the same boundaries as the new Madison Square Garden complex from Vishaan Chakrabarti’s Practice for Architecture and Urbanism that YIMBY recently revealed, the renderings offer a more finalized version of five skyscrapers with the tallest, referred to as Penn 15, anticipated to rise nearly 1,200 feet high. Foster + Partners is designing the structures, which would stand close to the 109-year-old James A. Farley Building and Skidmore Owings & Merrill‘s newly opened Moynihan Train Hall, as well as One and Two Penn Plaza and Madison Square Garden. The redesign also appears to be a tweaked iteration of 15 Penn Plaza from a previous depiction that YIMBY showed back in May 2020.

The parameters of the Penn District remain the same, bound by Sixth Avenue to the east, West 32nd Street to the south, Seventh Avenue to the west, and West 34th Street to the north. Penn 15 would replace the 1,700-room Hotel Pennsylvania and stand along Seventh Avenue between West 32nd and 33rd Streets. Renderings show a monolithic building massing divided into a set of staggered multi-story blocks, each enclosed with floor-to-ceiling glass and landscaped outdoor terraces on top of the cantilevering edges. Two thin, parallel vertical columns on the northern and southern elevations wrap over the top of the roof parapet, giving the impression of binding the rectangular blocks together. Penn 15’s core appears to be positioned on the northern side of the building’s footprint, maximizing office floor space and configuration possibilities for tenants.

The four other skyscrapers are shown rising along the southern edge of West 34th Street. Two flank each end of One Penn Plaza, while the final pair of towers stand immediately to the north and east of Penn 15. Each of these features a similar façades of glass and metal panels and includes landscaped terraces, but with different building profiles.

The Penn District will create one of the most dramatic changes to the Midtown skyline in a similar fashion to Related Companies’ first phase of Hudson Yards, just two avenues away to the west. Together with Brookfield Properties’ five-building Manhattan West development found between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, the three sites will elevate this section of New York City’s skyline west of the Empire State Building, but remain below the Art Deco’s architectural height of 1,250 feet.

A timeline for the Penn District’s massive undertaking has not been announced, though it would be ambitious to expect Penn 15 to come to fruition within this decade.

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