‘It’s really the workplace of the future’: inside JPMorganChase’s new Foster + Partners-designed HQ

When American banker John Pierpont Morgan decided to build his company a new Wall Street headquarters more than a century ago, he wanted to create a building that would ‘fall in line with the big modern improvements all around him.’ Though the resulting neoclassical edifice at 23 Wall Street – known as the House of Morgan – was just four storeys, a real estate trade journal called it ‘a rival to the Parthenon'.

This week, 112 years after the financier’s death, a new House of Morgan has sprung up in Manhattan, four miles north at 270 Park Avenue. If 23 Wall Street was Morgan’s Parthenon, this building is his Colossus: designed by Foster + Partners, the JPMorganChase tower rises a quarter-mile over Midtown and will accommodate some 10,000 employees by year’s end.

The $3 billion skyscraper, criss-crossed by a striking structural megaframe, occupies an entire city block and contains 2.5 million gross sq ft of flexible work spaces – including eight state-of-the-art trading floors, boutique wellness facilities and even a Danny Meyer-curated food hall.

‘It's really the workplace of the future, today,’ Norman Foster, founder and executive chairman of Foster + Partners, said during a ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday.

Foster + Partners was brought aboard the project in 2018, after winning a competition to create a revamped global headquarters for JPMorganChase, one that would replace an International Style skyscraper designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

The site was complicated, due to the complex system of rail lines that run beneath. But Lord Foster – whom David Arena, JPMorganChase’s head of global real estate, cheekily referred to as the project’s ‘Lord and often our saviour’ – designed imaginative structural system consisting of fan-shaped columns and triangular bracing that would anchor the building to bedrock 400ft below, while allowing the skyscraper to sit lightly on the site. In fact, the building hovers 80ft above the ground, creating room for a public plaza and green spaces – according to Foster, two-and-a-half times what is typical for such mammoth buildings.

‘This is a somewhat unusual tower,’ the architect continued. ‘It's different, and it's different for very positive reasons’ – chief among them, sustainability. 270 Park Avenue is the largest all-electric tower in New York City with net zero emissions, according to JPMorganChase. It’s also entirely powered by hydroelectric energy.

The building was also designed with employee wellness in mind, from taller-than-usual ceilings (the building is 60 stories, but is comparable in height to a 100-storey tower, according to Foster), circadian lighting, fresh air (more than double than what is usual) and a host of health-minded amenity spaces like a fitness centre, meditation rooms and even indoor spin studios. New-age guru Deepak Chopra was even brought in as a consultant.

But for all the innovation, the building is firmly rooted in tradition, according to Foster, just like the 225-year-old company it houses. ‘It doesn't use any of the fashionable computer wizardry to create exotic shapes,’ the architect said. The design team was inspired by both New York City’s grid system – which came of age with JP Morgan himself – and the grandeur of the traditional banking hall.

No greater is this communicated than in 270 Park Avenue’s soaring lobby, clad in travertine and illuminated by hundreds of honeycomb-like LED ceiling lights. Once visitors pass through a security barrier, they ascend a grand stairway towards an airy elevator lobby. The stairway is flanked by two monumental works by Gerhard Richter, Color Chase One and Color Chase Two. At the stair’s summit, near the elevators, is a lounge, carpeted in cream, dotted with club chairs and encircled by a slatted enclosure. At its centre is an American flag that flutters from an unseen breeze, a creation by Foster himself called Wind Dance.

Heritage is communicated on the exterior of the building, too: the muscular braces are clad in bronze. ‘Park Avenue is one of the great urban spaces in the world… The architecture is the celebration of that,’ Foster said. ‘Bronze is timeless in its qualities, in its endurance.’

The project is not without its controversy. In order to make way for the new 270 Park, JPMorganChase needed to demolish Bunshaft and de Blois’ Union Carbide building, a move that drew outcry from architects and preservationists. The company insists that, with its replacement, it’s giving back to the city, to the tune of $42 billion annually to the local economy, 8,000 construction jobs and the public plaza.

For JPMorganChase’s rank-and-file employees, there’s also the question of returning to the office. While many corporations have adapted to hybrid work schedules, JPMorganChase reinstated a full return-to-office mandate, a move that led employees to circulate a petition and for CEO and chairman Jamie Dimon to fire back with expletives. While the new office may offer some of the most attractive worker amenities in the city (‘You're never going to want to even go home, it's so incredible here,’ New York governor Kathy Hochul joked during the ceremony), it remains to be seen if spin classes and gourmet lunches will be enough.

At the building’s opening, though, the message was firm in more ways than one: before the ribbon-cutting, a DJ played an energetic Jackson 5 remix. The tune? ‘I Want You Back’.