By Jared Ebersole in Video 14 Aug 2026

IAC Building: The Manhattan Building That Bent Glass Into Sails

After years of unrealized New York proposals, Frank Gehry found his opening on the Hudson, where he turned an ordinary office curtain wall into a white, windblown landmark.

Frank Gehry had conquered Bilbao and reshaped the Los Angeles skyline, but New York remained stubbornly out of reach. His Manhattan proposals included a theatrical remake of One Times Square and an immense Guggenheim complex beside the East River. Neither was built.

The stalemate finally ended in Chelsea, where internet conglomerate IAC wanted to gather employees from seven New York offices inside one unmistakable headquarters. Completed in March 2007, the IAC Building became Gehry’s first freestanding structure in the city, and a rare experiment in making glass appear soft.

Where it is

555 West 18th Street, New York, NY 10011

A corporate headquarters under sail

IAC chairman Barry Diller originally imagined building on a Hudson River pier. When that proved impractical, developer the Georgetown Company found a dry-land site across Eleventh Avenue from the waterfront. Gehry and Diller, both sailors, arrived at a composition commonly read as overlapping sails filled by the wind.

That maritime effect had to emerge from an office building with eight working floors, not a hollow sculpture. Gehry’s studio produced 51 models during roughly a year of design work, exploring how several stacked volumes could lean, swell and recede while preserving usable interiors.

The white color was almost accidental. Early study models were made in white, and Diller liked the result enough to make it part of the brief. Glass, however, does not naturally resemble opaque canvas. The solution was ceramic frit: thousands of small white dots fused to the panels in graduated patterns. Dense areas conceal floor slabs and office furniture, while a clearer horizontal band at eye level preserves employees’ views and admits daylight.

From outside, those transitions visually merge the panels into broad white forms. After dark, illumination from within partially reverses the effect, revealing more of the building behind its milky skin.

Teaching flat glass to curve

The façade’s geometry created the harder problem. Conventional hot-bending would have required heating and shaping thousands of large glass pieces, a costly process for a commercial project. Curtain-wall specialist Permasteelisa instead exploited glass’s limited natural flexibility.

The prefabricated panels arrived essentially flat. During installation, their corners were pulled into slightly different positions by the supporting frames, cold-warping each roughly 14-foot panel by as much as four inches. A small distortion repeated across the envelope was enough to turn straight manufactured pieces into the building’s continuous waves.

IAC described the project as the first glass curtain wall cold-warped on this scale. The method also demonstrates an important architectural truth: Gehry’s famous curves were not simply gestures drawn by one celebrated designer. They depended on digital models, full-scale testing, specialized fabrication and contractors willing to establish how far a familiar material could safely be pushed.

The completed building gave West Chelsea an early piece of destination architecture before the High Line opened its first section in 2009 and accelerated the neighborhood’s transformation. Gehry later added the rippling residential tower at 8 Spruce Street, but the IAC Building was the project that first made his version of New York tangible: not in the titanium associated with Bilbao, but in ordinary glass persuaded to catch an imaginary wind.