A colossal new skyscraper has emerged among Manhattan's elegant spires, fundamentally altering the city's iconic skyline. The towering structure, which serves as JP Morgan's new global headquarters, rises like a dark, imposing mass above neighboring buildings, its bulky stepped design resembling several towers bound together. From certain angles, it appears as a hulking bar chart, while from others it looms like a coffin casting shadows over the delicate Chrysler Building.
This architectural behemoth represents the new fortress of JP Morgan, the world's largest bank with a market capitalization of $855 billion—more than Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup combined. The financial giant made over $1 billion weekly in profits for the first time last year. Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, who boasts about the company's "fortress balance sheet," now has a literal fortress to match, built at a staggering cost of approximately $4 billion.
The massive structure is the work of Foster + Partners, led by 90-year-old Norman Foster, who has a history of designing extravagant bank headquarters. His HSBC tower in Hong Kong held the record as the world's most expensive building when it opened in 1986, featuring elaborate structural elements that one former partner described as "a sledgehammer to crack a nut." The JP Morgan tower takes this excess to new extremes, using what critics describe as "a bronze-plated bulldozer to puree a pea."
The building's structural specifications are staggering and controversial. At 60 stories and 423 meters tall, it contains an obscene 95,000 tons of structural steel—60% more than the Empire State Building, which is both taller and contains more square footage. One engineer calculated that if flattened into a belt 30mm wide by 5mm thick, this steel would wrap around the world twice, serving as a fitting symbol of the bank's global dominance.
At street level, the tower erupts from the sidewalk with enormous clusters of steel columns that fan out at each corner like grasping fingers. These columns, positioned to avoid underground train tracks, splay outward to support the building's massive weight above newly created strips of privately owned public space. The shallow steps and planters appear deliberately designed to discourage lingering. On Madison Avenue, the building presents an incongruous cliff face of carved granite boulders—an artwork by Maya Lin that unfortunately resembles fiberglass scenery from Disney's Frontierland.
On Park Avenue, security guards allow visitors to peer through windows at a surreal lobby feature: a 12-meter-high bronze flagpole displaying an American flag that flutters in an artificially generated indoor breeze. This artwork by Foster himself is designed to reflect outside wind conditions, though on calm days it billows vigorously, demonstrating how JP Morgan controls even the weather within its corporate city.
The interior matches the building's colossal exterior proportions. Great walls of fluted travertine, sourced from a single Italian quarry, rise through the 24-meter-high lobby alongside a grand staircase framed by massive Gerhard Richter paintings. The building functions as a vertical office-wellness universe for 10,000 workers, featuring 19 restaurants with kitchen-to-desk delivery, a hair salon, meditation rooms, fitness center, medical clinic, and pub.
The column-free office floors utilize circadian rhythm lighting to create a carefully controlled environment detached from the outside world, similar to Las Vegas casinos, encouraging employees never to leave their desks. This aligns with Dimon's serious commitment to ending remote work, despite employee preferences. The tower serves as his machine to crush the hybrid-working movement permanently.
Despite claims of lofty ceiling heights, social media images of the new trading floors drew swift condemnation. Critics compared the workspace to factory-farmed chickens, Chinese sweatshops, and the very 1950s cellular office layouts that open-plan designs supposedly replace. A conspicuous steel truss zigzagging through the space contradicts column-free claims and raises questions about structural logic. Engineers note that adding more columns and reducing spans could have cut the building's carbon footprint by 20-30%, but this would have eliminated the heroic steelwork Foster and Dimon desired.
The building's theatrical nighttime display adds to the controversy. Every evening, the tower's summit transforms into a glittering crown with twinkling lights rising up the facade like a supersized champagne flute. Created by artist Leo Villareal, who recently illuminated Thames bridges, the display sometimes resembles the Eye of Sauron, while at other moments appears as a pulsating void.
What makes this extravagance particularly galling is the unnecessary destruction of a perfectly functional building. The 52-story Union Carbide headquarters, built in 1960 as celebrated work by Natalie de Blois at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, stood as a sleek modernist monument. JP Morgan had even completed a full refurbishment and environmental upgrade in 2012, trumpeting it as "the largest green renovation of a headquarters building in the world." Just seven years later, the same bank demolished what became the tallest building ever intentionally destroyed, replacing it with something nearly twice the height but only eight additional floors.
This destruction resulted from a 2017 zoning change driven by East Midtown landlords' fears of losing prominence as the world's premier business address. As office tenants migrated west to Hudson Yards' gleaming towers—known in real estate terms as "flight to quality"—the city responded with shortsighted self-sabotage, allowing Midtown to reshape itself after Hudson Yards' soulless corporate wasteland.
The new incentives encouraged demolition by permitting sales of unused air rights from landmarked buildings within the 78-block area. Historical structures that didn't utilize their maximum allowable bulk could sell unused potential to others. JP Morgan acquired 65,000 square meters of air rights from Grand Central Terminal and 5,000 square meters from nearby St. Bartholomew's Church, inflating its size far beyond normal limits.
The JP Morgan tower represents just the beginning of a new breed of steroidal supertalls. An even larger 487-meter-high, 62-story tower recently received approval at 350 Park Avenue, also designed by Foster + Partners with a similar bundled appearance. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill won permission for an equally massive structure at 175 Park Avenue, featuring more converging column fans. This Midtown section will soon resemble bloated bankers squeezed into stilettos, casting longer shadows down Manhattan's canyons while obliterating views of cherished peaks and crushing handsome, functional buildings.
The implications extend beyond New York, a city long shaped by unbridled capital where form follows finance and property owners build regardless of citizen concerns. Foster's bronze giant previews what may soon rise in London on an even grander scale. Last week, JP Morgan announced plans for a 280,000-square-meter European headquarters in Canary Wharf—by far London's largest office building, containing more space than the Shard, Gherkin, and Walkie-Talkie combined. The Foster + Partners design has only been teased with glimpses of curved bronze fins wrapping a bulging glass drum, suggesting more controversial architecture ahead.
