The new headquarters of the world's largest bank in New York will have zero operating emissions

After the coronavirus pandemic, the question arose whether the large corporate headquarters and office towers, which occupy the best locations in city centers not only in America, would ever be fully utilized again—or whether home office would permanently render the corporate tower building type obsolete. There was also discussion about whether this would be good or bad news for the vitality of city centers.

Although many former bank skyscrapers on Wall Street have been converted into expensive apartments, people in Midtown Manhattan, the world's most famous business district, don't want to hear anything about a possible crisis in corporate skyscrapers: Even though the new ultra-tall asparagus towers on the southern edge of Central Park are primarily residential, new office towers are sprouting into the sky in Midtown.

The most prominent and tallest example is the new headquarters of the world's largest bank. JP Morgan Chase commissioned the doyen of British high-tech architecture, Lord Norman Foster of London, to design the bank tower.

Foster's meteoric rise in contemporary architecture began with a bank tower for HSBC in Hong Kong. Given that Foster is 89 years old, the two bank towers in Hong Kong and New York can be seen as the alpha and omega of his unusually successful architectural career.

And the Omega, the new giant tower for JP Morgan Chase, now highlights all the advantages and disadvantages of this building type as if in a magnifying glass. Its location between Park Avenue and Madison Avenue, as well as 47th and 48th Streets, couldn't be better. To avoid further overshadowing the dense business district around Grand Central Station or visually overwhelming the street canyons, Foster came up with a special design for the lower eight floors of his super-highrise: The tower tapers towards the bottom.

Huge diagonal steel struts prop up the tower and also characterize its facades. They stiffen the building and give it stability. They are reminiscent of the late 1960s, of buildings like the John Hancock Tower in Chicago, which took such visible structures to their aesthetic peak. In Foster's design, 24 gigantic columns support the lobby and the floors above, which taper elegantly towards the top through setbacks in the west and east. The skyscraper, taller than the Empire State Building, balances like a ballerina on tiptoes.

Today, developers and their architects have to justify the construction of energy-hungry supertowers. This also applies to the major New York bank and its new building in Manhattan: The steel, glass, and concrete used in their construction ultimately cause high _CO2 emissions. The operation of such office towers, their air conditioning systems, elevators, and electric lighting also account for a large portion of the energy consumption in a metropolis like New York.

Foster, whose career is rooted in applying principles of biology and physics to the architecture of modern commercial buildings, promises "net-zero operating emissions" for his giant tower, as the new corporate headquarters will be the "tallest all-electric tower in the city." This term is intended to describe the fact that the "clean" energy used by and in the building will be generated outside the city.

The electricity used to operate the JP Morgan Chase Tower comes from existing hydroelectric power plants and therefore has no impact on greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation in New York. Therefore, no emissions are generated during operation. However, the dam already existed.

New York City's heating is usually done with steam- or water-based district heating, which is why steam picturesquely billows from the storm drains in every New York movie. Fossil fuels and waste have traditionally been used to generate district heating. Furthermore, New York City prohibits the use of natural gas in new buildings.

Critics, however, consider this a smokescreen, a case of greenwashing, because the embodied energy isn't taken into account. The developer demolished the massive Union Carbide Building to make room for its new building. The 52-story tower, built in 1960, is the tallest skyscraper in the world to have been demolished unnecessarily.

Although almost all of the building's components were recycled, this also required a significant amount of energy. The previous tower was designed by a female architect, Natalie de Blois, and was long considered the tallest building in the world designed by a woman.

The 423-meter-high tower will accommodate 14,000 employees. The 60-story building is intended not only to be sustainable but also to promote the well-being and health of its users. The planners are also citing urban planning considerations: the new building will offer more than twice as much public space at street level as its demolished predecessor. Wider sidewalks and a 1,000-square-meter plaza in front of the tower are intended to contribute to the enhancement of Terminal City, as the district near the train station is called.

It emerged a hundred years ago around Grand Central Terminal, which opened in 1913. Only dedicated New York experts know that the predecessor of the new JP Morgan Chase headquarters, the Union Carbide Building by Natalie de Blois, also displaced a beautiful building: the Hotel Marguery, built in 1917, was once the home of the inventor, researcher, and engineer Nikola Tesla. The city is a palimpsest, and economic pressure leads to ever new rewritings of the urban "text."

The new tower for the mighty bank is almost twice as tall as its predecessor. To achieve this, however, the developer had to resort to a divine trick: He bought the building rights from the neighboring St. Bartholomew's Church, allowing him to plant such a tall exclamation mark in the Midtown Manhattan skyline.