Posted Nov 10, 2025, 4:18 PM
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Join Date: Jul 2001
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...dows-manhattan
Jamie Dimon’s $4 Billion Fortress HQ Takes On the New York Skyline
JPMorgan’s new 270 Park Avenue tower is a domineering departure from other projects by architect Norman Foster.
By Felix Salmon
November 10, 2025
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Norman Foster, the building’s architect, says “it’s four-square, right-angled. It occupies the grid.” When you face the tower from the west or the east, it appears as a receding series of boxes; the horizontal of the roof is a full city block long. In that sense, it’s very different from the Gherkin in London or other icons with which Foster made his name, which tend to be much lighter in affect. (Foster designed Bloomberg’s European headquarters in London.) Instead of soaring effortlessly into the sky, like Foster + Partners’ 425 Park Avenue a few blocks to the north, 270 Park wears its weight heavily, with cumbersome cantilevered wings looming over the Park and Madison entrances. It’s much closer to being an immovable object than an unstoppable force, its cryptic marketing slogan (“make unstoppable happen”) notwithstanding.
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Although the exterior envelope of the building is finished, there’s still one big unknown about 270 Park, which is how it will look at night. With the clocks turned back and New York facing months of 4:30 p.m. sunsets, the upper reaches of the tower will be home later this year to the most visible piece of public art in the city, Celestial Passage, an installation by light artist Leo Villareal. Omens are positive: While the building’s illumination during construction was prone to gaudiness — it featured an animated American flag on July 4, for instance — the bank promises that Villareal’s piece will be made up of “gently shifting waves of monochromatic light.” The best-case scenario is that it will become as beloved as Villareal’s illumination of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco from 2013 to 2023; at worst, it will still be more popular than Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel (aka the Shawarma) in Hudson Yards.
The sheer enormousness of 270 Park is a result of new zoning for bigger and taller buildings in Midtown signed into law in 2017. The building might be eco-friendly in terms of energy usage — it’s “harnessing advanced blockchain technology” to ensure its energy budget is 100% hydroelectric — but that efficiency is less evident in its use of materials. The tower’s 95,000 tons of structural steel works out to 60% more than can be found in the Empire State Building, which is taller and has greater square footage.
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JPMorgan’s contemporary neighbors, most notably KPF’s One Vanderbilt, often seek to modestly hide their bulk with translucency and setbacks; one of the most beautiful New York skyscrapers of this century, Fumihiko Maki’s 4 World Trade Center, is practically invisible. By contrast, the ostentatious hyperscale of 270 Park evinces a bull-market boldness at the largest bank in the world, and signals the definitive end to any humility born of the financial crisis.
The in-your-face nature of the new HQ is not particularly surprising, given Dimon’s famously pugilistic nature. Foster himself characterized his building’s topping-out ceremony as being “chauvinistic,” and went so far as to personally design a flagpole for the lobby with a built-in wind machine that seeks to replicate the weather conditions outdoors.
The CEO and starchitect are teaming up again to design what may become the largest office building in London, which means that JPMorgan could end up in the history books as one of the most consequential global real estate developers of the decade. While huge buildings often try to look smaller than they are, at 270 Park they’ve built something that tries to look even larger. Perhaps JPMorgan is too big to veil.
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