ABC Office Building

Model for ABC Building. (Hedrich-Blessing photo)

Dates: 1963 - 1963
Location: New York, NY
Type: Commercial
”In contrast to the superficial elegance of the... building palaces that are characteristic of the New York environment, we achieved our elegance in the concept of the way the space ought to be arranged, in the structure of the building and also in the way the building participated in the New York environment”

Oral History

A plan view of a typical office floor. (Hedrich-Blessing photo)

This unrealized project for a new American Broadcasting Company headquarters was a sixty-story office tower at 67th and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. It was to have housed both ABC’s corporate body of 1400 employees and their broadcast studios. The proposed building was a complex circular structure of concrete and glass which resembled a set of bundled tubes. Goldberg clustered related “companies” and knitted them together, arranging interior space so that it more closely followed ABC’s organizational structure. The various clusters were organized around a communal space in the center for joint enterprises. Goldberg providing a windowed, daylit area for the secretaries, and each level of management had easy access to one another. The focal point of the design was a major transmission antenna, a graceful structure that would have been the tallest in New York City. It was never built due to financial difficulties.

As described by Goldberg in his Oral History, “in our perhaps over studied way, we began to pry into their business organization, and we discovered that the way they actually operated was quite different from the way they thought they operated. They were actually a series of little companies, each with its own special way of making money and functioning in a communications system.”

View of model showing heights of building and transmission antennae.