Disney’s New Downtown Headquarters Is All New York

Disney has plunked itself and its 1.2 million square feet of real estate in the middle of a distinctly un-gaudy neighborhood. In the 20th century, the area evolved into a hodgepodge of printing presses, candy companies, parking structures (including one that in the ’70s was repurposed into the gay disco Paradise Garage), and fume-hazed approaches to the Holland Tunnel. The buildings are mostly big and solid and serious — the exception being the glass sore thumb of the Dominick Hotel (formerly Trump Soho). To assemble the properties, Disney razed City Winery (which before that was another media center, the home of El Diario/La Prensa) and a full block of low-rise commercial buildings, but a 2013 rezoning precluded replacing them with a single glittering glass stalagmite. Instead, SOM produced two towers facing off across a ten-story valley, its bulk broken up by an assortment of setbacks and planted terraces. Squint, and it could almost be several buildings, slotted in among the neighborhood’s collection of rooftops and water tanks. Squint again, and you can detect the kinship with Central Park West’s double-towered Art Deco apartments, like the El Dorado.

The SOM team, led by Colin Koop, has even one-upped the competition in a citywide revival of a storied façade material: terra-cotta. The exterior’s thick, undulating frames faintly recall the glazed surfaces of a century ago and the cast-iron facades of Soho. There’s a whiff of nature in the city, too — rus in urbe — in the planted terraces (designed by SCAPE) and pine-green columns that come in clusters of three at the bottom, pairs above, and singly at the top, like a forest that thins as it approaches the tree line. The color adapts to the weather as the terra-cotta shifts from pale gray to dark brown depending on cloud cover and time of day. In some sections, terra-cotta drops away, ceding the façade to sections of matte-brass finials and glass with a soft sandstone hue. The palette and texture resonate with the neighborhood’s shades of weathered copper and ocher brick.

The terra-cotta façade anchors the design in one of New York’s great architectural traditions.
Photo: Dave Burk/SOM

All of which is to say that a company identified with sunny climes and what the critic Ada Louise Huxtable called “doctored reality” has bought itself some genuine New York architecture. The common thread is the intertwining of high-grade engineering and historical reference, in an iteration that doesn’t indulge in hyperrealistic fakery or honeyed nostalgia. It invites employees into Gensler’s high-grade office space with the usual airy lounges, reservable breakout rooms, and daily food temptations. The top-floor link between the two towers is a wide-open commons, daylit by angled skylights like an airborne factory floor. And wherever you look, there you are — not in some sanitized wonderland or gated suburban campus, but in an actual city — specifically, this gray-and-tan, slovenly, haphazard, congested, miraculous, but irreducibly real Manhattan. Three decades ago, when Times Square was being renovated, critics complained that the heart of sordidness had been stripped of authenticity and slathered in a layer of cloying cuteness — that it had been, in a word, Disneyfied. These days, in Hudson Square, Disney has been New Yorkified.

Photo: Dave Burk/SOM