Vocon and MdeAS Architects Polish Up Eero Saarinen’s ‘Black Rock’ CBS Building in New York

The only high-rise designed by Eero Saarinen, the 38-story CBS headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, turned heads from the very start. Clad in black granite with aggressive diamond-shaped piers wrapping around all four sides, the building offered a muscular contrast to the ethereal curtain-wall office towers rising around it when it opened in 1965. Instead of employing a steel frame and resting lightly on pilotis or slender columns, it had a reinforced-concrete structure at its core and along its perimeter. Sitting directly on the ground, it emerged like a sharply chiseled mountain from a sunken plaza separating it from the city’s sidewalks. No wonder everyone called it “Black Rock.”

The challenge to Vocon and MdeAS Architects, the design firms charged with renovating the plaza, the ground floor, and a lower level, was to update the building’s common areas to attract tenants operating in a post-Covid, hybrid-work era while retaining the unapologetic midcentury swagger of Saarinen’s iconic structure.

Read more in this feature from Architectural Record.