By Jared Ebersole in Video — 11 Jul 2026

The Skyscraper Built Inside a Landmark Shell

Hearst Tower solved an old New York problem by preserving a 1928 landmark base while building a 46-story diagrid tower through it.

Hearst Tower looks like two buildings that made a deal.

At the bottom is a six-story Art Deco stone base from 1928. Above it is a 46-story glass-and-steel tower by Foster + Partners, folded into a pattern of giant triangles. The old building looks heavy, theatrical, and rooted in the street. The new one looks sharp, structural, and almost suspended.

That contrast is the point.

Where it is

Hearst Tower, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019

William Randolph Hearst built the original Hearst Magazine Building as a beginning, not an ending. Designed by Joseph Urban with George B. Post & Sons, the base was completed in 1928 and intended to support a future tower. The clues were already there: a robust frame, extra elevator capacity, and a composition that looked like a podium waiting for something taller.

Then the Great Depression arrived.

The tower did not.

For decades, the base sat at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street as an architectural fragment, a headquarters that had never grown into the skyscraper Hearst imagined. In 1988, New York City designated the facade a landmark. That protected the old stone exterior, but it also complicated the company's long-delayed desire for a modern headquarters.

The problem was not simply aesthetic.

Hearst could not just demolish the base and start over. But the company also could not rest a major modern skyscraper casually on 1920s masonry. The old facade had historical value, while the new tower needed its own structural logic, foundations, elevators, mechanical systems, fire safety, and office floors.

Norman Foster's solution was to treat the landmark as a shell and the tower as a new structure rising through it.

During construction, the interior of the old building was largely removed, creating a huge atrium behind the preserved facade. New structural columns were threaded down behind the old walls and into new foundations. The historic stone became the public face and urban memory of the project, while the tower's weight moved through contemporary steel and concrete rather than relying on the old facade to do the work.

That is why the lobby feels so dramatic.

From inside, you can read the old exterior as an interior wall. The original base becomes a perimeter around a vast communal room, with escalators, water, stone, glass, and steel connecting the street to the office tower above. It is preservation turned inside out.

The tower's structure is just as important.

Instead of a conventional vertical frame, Hearst Tower uses a diagrid: a diagonal grid of steel triangles wrapped around the perimeter. Foster + Partners says the triangulated structure used 20 percent less steel than a conventionally framed building of similar scale. The diagonal system carries loads efficiently while giving the tower its unmistakable faceted silhouette.

The "bird's mouths" at the corners are the visible consequence.

Because the diagonal triangles do structural work normally handled by vertical columns and conventional bracing, the corners can be cut and folded back. That creates the jagged notches climbing the building, making the tower look like it has been pinched or carved at its edges. The shape is not arbitrary decoration. It is the diagrid announcing itself.

The same efficiency helped support the building's sustainability story.

Hearst Tower became New York City's first occupied green office tower to receive LEED Gold certification. The building reused the landmark base, incorporated recycled steel, collected rainwater, used high-efficiency systems, and turned material savings into part of the architecture's public identity. In a city where demolishing and rebuilding is often the default, Hearst became an argument for adding carefully to what already exists.

But the building is not modest.

It is a corporate headquarters, a showpiece, and a very expensive act of preservation. The old base survives, but not as it once functioned. Its interior was sacrificed to make the new atrium and tower possible. That trade is what makes the project interesting rather than simple.

Hearst finally got the tower William Randolph Hearst had imagined.

It just arrived almost 80 years late, carried by a triangular steel frame, standing inside the hollowed-out shell of the building that had been waiting for it all along.