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On a full-block site, a rarity in high-density Manhattan, an enormous new corporate headquarters has risen. For its bulk, it is almost obsessively unshowy, though its oversize windows, framed in rounded extrusions of iridescent terra-cotta, reward notice along the street. Identified only as 7 Hudson Square, the 19-story Robert A. Iger Building gathers the disparate New York production and corporate operations of The Walt Disney Company into a single hub. Though there is an entrance for studio audiences and tours, as well as two other access points for staff and guests, the quiet sobriety of SOM’s exterior does not include logos or Mickey Mouse statues waving at passersby. 

It is the opposite of the self-conscious “entertainment architecture” commissioned by Michael Eisner, the CEO who became an architecture aficionado in the 1990s, hiring Michael Graves for over-the-top PoMo extravaganzas including the Burbank Team Disney headquarters, which has the Seven Dwarfs holding up a classical pediment. Other name-brand architects of the era devised brightly colored confections, including Robert A.M. Stern and Arata Isozaki.

Cartoon imagery can’t capture the breadth of the media and entertainment conglomerate Disney is now. Seven Hudson Square has little in common with the theme parks, animation studios, and other entertainment operations that are run out of the Burbank, California, headquarters. The new building unites tech-intensive news, editorial, streaming, and live productions with a variety of corporate office functions. These include well-known brands such as ABC and ESPN.

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Rounded extrusions of iridescent terra-cotta reward notice along the street (1). The building steps back in lushly planted terraces (2&3). Photos © Dave Burk, click to enlarge

Finding the right site was no easy feat when considering a 1.2 million-square-foot structure in Manhattan. Disney obtained a full block in the Lower Manhattan Hudson Square district from Trinity Church Wall Street. The new headquarters aids the company’s quest to hire and retain top talent, and keep them together, explained Andrew Arel, vice president, Cor­porate Real Estate Design and Delivery, adding, “We wanted to be downtown, in a neighborhood, part of a community.”

What had been a thriving printing district of brawny loft buildings now hosts media and tech startups. Tech is increasingly infused in Disney’s businesses, and the profile of the neighborhood (Google’s New York headquarters is close by) aids recruitment.

Building section. Drawing courtesy SOM, click to enlarge

The zoning was congenial to the very large floor plates the company sought. It allowed filling almost the entire site with a 100-foot-high base before requiring wedding cake–style setbacks that SOM massaged into “nested volumes,” as partner Colin Koop put it. They reconcile Disney’s program with emulation of the predominant loft-building scale.

The architectural strategy also responded to Disney CEO Robert A. Iger’s stated desire to “stand out while fitting in.” Aside from taming the building’s great bulk, SOM navigated this contradiction through its curtain wall design. Rather than default to acres of characterless glass, oversize windows are inset 30 inches and wrapped by tubular pilasters and spandrels made of green terra-cotta, a nod to the punched-masonry facades typical of the neighborhood. From a distance, the softly iridescent ceramic sheen enlivens the formidable street walls. Expanses of champagne-tinted aluminum panels faced with vertical rods accent setbacks and building insets, as if the window wall had been sliced away.

Photo © Dave Burk, click to enlarge

The first eight stories of the steel-framed building, most around 84,000 square feet each, almost fill the site. Two circulation and services cores are offset to the east and west, to free up much of the central floor plate for vast media production areas and double-height broadcast studios designed by Gensler.

To break down silos, one vast floor hosts workstations that bring together the news operations of ABC, WABC (the local affiliate), and ESPN, with broadcast in the same location as radio, web, and streaming production. Gensler channels the architectural restraint in the interior finish palette: exposed ceilings, oatmeal carpet, and gray metal and oak accents. “We did not want the aesthetics to overpower this platform for creativity,” explained Johnathan Sandler, Gensler’s work­place-strategy director. The inspiration was the sleek industrial-garage look of Pixar’s Emeryville, California, headquarters, designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson with Steve Jobs before Disney acquired the company. “The palette was intended to feel effortlessly stylish and confident,” Sandler added. “Sprezzatura is the Italian term, and Disney liked that.”

Photo © Dave Burk

Workspaces offer sweeping views of the Hudson River to the west. Photo © Garrett Rowland

The bustling floors, with densely packed workstations, open long vistas, so that editors can quickly coordinate breaking-news tasks across broadcast, web, and streaming. The vastness of the floors causes ceiling heights (constrained by the zoning envelope) to seem low, but daylight penetrates deep within the building. With mobile phones, laptops, and tech infrastructure common to all, staff can roam wherever their tasks take them, with numerous places to meet, confer, or take a break in lounges that open to views.

Below grade are five additional studios, tucked between the side cores, three of which were built with high ceilings jammed with video tech and some 12 camera positions for programs like The View and Good Morning America that are filmed before a live audience of up to 200. To calibrate multiple audiences’ moving into and out of the studios, viewers are ushered into a dedicated entrance, through a food hall (not yet built), into a pre-show lobby. To achieve the column-free spans necessary for the studios, truss frames fill the full height of the second floor to transfer the column loads from above. The trusses also suspend the ground floor and loading dock.

Above the base, the building steps back in lushly planted terraces, by landscape architect Scape Studio, to two office towers that top out the building at 290 feet.

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A ninth-floor conference center connects to the 10th-floor Great Room (4) via a pair of sculptural stairs that rise through a double-height opening (6). Advance screenings are shown in the theater (5). Photos © Dave Burk (4); Garrett Rowland (5-6), click to enlarge

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A ninth-floor conference center connects to the 10th-floor Great Room via a pair of sculptural stairs that rise through a double-height opening. The Great Room is the headquarters’ centerpiece, a gathering and event space that hinges the building’s production floors below to offices above. Flooded with daylight through skylights supported by beams clad in micro-perforated metal panels with a faux wood finish, the room’s 30-foot-high window walls open both north and south to outdoor terraces and panoramas of Lower Manhattan’s tapestry of rooflines and water towers. Its lounge furniture, along with a café and reading room, are intended to draw people from all over the building to relax, meet, and connect. 

The all-electric building aims for LEED Platinum and cutting carbon emissions to 50 percent of New York’s strict Local Law 97 carbon-emissions limit. A large-scale heat pump installation helps to meet that goal, along with a suite of tactics that include high-performance facades and heat recovery. 

The IT-intensive long-span production facilities at 7 Hudson Square might have been built more cheaply in a low-rise suburban form, but Disney is nearly unique in seeing value in the potential of bringing creation and production together in intensively collaborative proximity. With tech and tastes morphing at lightning speed, Disney can quickly make changes and bring new ideas, new entertainment, and new formats quickly to market.

Photo © Dave Burk

Click drawings to enlarge