This redesign of the 28,000-square-foot public atrium and lobby at Park Avenue Plaza, a prominent Midtown Manhattan office tower, makes its mark alongside such neighboring modernist icons as the Seagram’s Building, Lever House and Paley Park. Inspired by an urban streetscape and a European piazza, the modern new scheme for the through-block arcade centers on a dramatic colonnade of sculptural clear-glass piers.
Together with subtle pools of light, “vignettes” of moveable seating, a black granite reflecting pool, and a coffee bar, the colonnade encourages office workers and passersby to pause and interact. The result is a warmly modernist space, one designed not just to pass through but to occupy, at once an extension of the city’s urban vitality and a refuge from it.