In October 1977, the 59-story Citicorp Center (now known as the Citigroup Center) made its debut on a shabby stretch of East Midtown marked by aging apartment houses, massage parlors, and hair salons.
Hugh Stubbins’ cantilevered design spanned Lexington Avenue between East 53rd and East 54th Streets. It included a sunken plaza, new subway station access, retail shops, and an iconoclastic triangular roof that sloped at a 45 degree angle (below photo).
The bold design, plus the four raised columns located in the center of the building’s base rather than the corners, awed many architectural critics.
“The building starts nine stories above ground, raised on four colossal square columns and a central core in one of the most impressive—if somewhat disquieting—architectural acrobatic acts in the world,” wrote Ada Louise Huxtable in the New York Times, four months before the tower officially opened.
“I am not ever going to ask what Citicorp’s steel cost,” continued Huxtable. “But all that brute strength is now encased in the thinnest, flattest, sleekest panels of softly glistening, silvery aluminum, alternating with horizontal bands of glass. It is steel muscle in a silken glove.”…