The General Electric Building is a skyscraper at the southwestern corner of Lexington Avenue and 51st Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The building, designed by Cross & Cross and completed in 1931, was known as the RCA Victor Building during its construction. It contains a 50-floor, 640-foot-tall stylized Gothic octagonal brick tower, with elaborate Art Deco decorations of lightning bolts showing the power of electricity.
About General Electric Building in brief
The General Electric Building is a skyscraper at the southwestern corner of Lexington Avenue and 51st Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The building, designed by Cross & Cross and completed in 1931, was known as the RCA Victor Building during its construction. 570 Lexington Avenue contains a 50-floor, 640-foot-tall stylized Gothic octagonal brick tower, with elaborate Art Deco decorations of lightning bolts showing the power of electricity. There are 46 office floors in total, as well as four mechanical floors, although the 48th and 49th floors also once contained executive dining rooms. Sources disagree slightly on the building’s precise height. Emporis gives a height of 640 feet, while the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s Skyscraper Center cites the building as being 643 feet. The building was extensively renovated by Ernest de Castro of the WCA Design Group in the 1990s. It was designated a New York. City landmark in 1985 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. The base and tower form the entire lot area. Between the 13th and 25th floors, the building contains shallow setbacks on each side of the elevation. The tower is set back from the round-cornered base with elaborate masonry and architectural figural sculpture. The crown of the building, an example of Gothic tracery, is intended to represent electricity and radio waves. The Lexington Avenue51st Street station, served by the 4, 6, <6>, E, and M trains, is adjacent to the north side ofThe building was designed to blend with the low Byzantine dome of the adjacent St.
Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on Park Avenue, with the same brick coloring and architectural terracotta decoration. It sits on the northeastern portion of a city block bounded by Park Avenue to the west, 50th Street to the south, Lexington Ave to the east, and 51 St. to the North. The General Electric building is also near the Waldorf Astoria New York to theSouth and the Summit Hotel and Beverly Hotel to theEast. It is not an eight-sided plan, except on the northeast corner below the 35th floor, which is not chamfered to form an eight floor plan. It has 46 floors, except for the 40th and 40th, which rise to three additional floors above the corner below 51st St. The 50th and 50th floors contain projecting pyramidal dormers that rise to one additional floor above the 51st. Street elevation, which also has a setback at the 25th floor. The 45th and 46th floors have a setback that rises to one of three additional stories above 51stst Street, which rises to three more stories above the previous corner above the 50th. The 46th and 47th floors were once the offices of General Electric, which had its headquarters there between 1933 and 1974, and retained ownership until 1993, when it was donated to Columbia University.
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This page is based on the article General Electric Building published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 09, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
