BKSK Architects and engineering consultancy Buro Happold have announced the debut of the newest and most dramatic iteration of New York City’s iconic Tammany Hall, a 90-year-old neo-Georgian edifice flanking the northeastern end of Union Square at the corner of 17th Street and Park Avenue South. The dramatic pièce de résistance of the historic preservation-minded intervention is a monumental glass and steel parametric dome that that tops a three-story addition. The renovation and redevelopment of Tammany Hall—now known as 44 Union Square—added 30,000 square feet of commercial office space to the 1929 structure, which was designated as a city landmark by the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission in 2013.
Tammany Hall has a rich and complex history as the former headquarters of the patronage-fueled political machine that, somewhat confusingly, bears the same name. Tammany Hall—also commonly referred to as the Tammany Society, among other names—played a formidable role in Democratic New York City politics from the late 18th century through the early 20th century despite its enduring associations with corruption and graft. Tammany Hall’s headquarters at 44 Union Square was erected as a replacement for its former digs, located several blocks away adjacent to the Consolidated Edison Building on 14th Street, at the height of the society’s popularity during the post-William M. “Boss” Tweed era. In 1943, as Tammany Hall’s political grip on the city began to wane, the society sold its grand Union Square “wigwam,” as the organization’s various meeting halls were referred to, to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. After several decades of serving as a central hub for the ILGWU and a meeting place for numerous unions and labor organizations, the building was readapted in the 1980s as a performing arts venue. In the mid-1990s, the New York Film Academy, one of the building’s final non-retail tenants before its renovation, moved in.
Now owned by Reading International (RDI), the old Tammany Hall has been revived and expanded as a modern, mixed-use commercial office and retail building. Slack had originally been slated to lease the entire redeveloped property but walked away from the deal in February of this year.
The expansive engineering and design team deployed numerous interventions in the restoration, including the decoupling and reattaching of two of the building’s landmarked facades (a rare and complex effort), the repointing of historic brickwork, and the replacement of all existing windows. As Ivanoff elaborated in a press statement released by Buro Happold: “We also collaborated with BKSK Architects in detailing new glazed terra-cotta sunscreen elements to echo the angles and location of a historic slate roof.”
Yet the most conspicuous new element of the rebirth of 44 Union Square, its 11,250-square-foot freeform dome, is also perhaps the most evocative of its past.
The dome’s structure was designed to suggest a tortoise shell, which was the symbol of Tamanend, a tribal leader known as Saint Tammany or King Tammany. Born in the early 17th century, Tamanend, known for promoting peace and friendship, served as Chief of the Turtle Clan of the Delaware Valley’s Lenni-Lenape nation and became a wildly popular figure, particularly in the Philadelphia area, following his death in 1701. Tammany Hall was founded in 1789 initially as the New York branch of Philadelphia-borne Tammany Society movement. (The fetishism of Native American culture, seen at the time as a gesture of respect to the beloved Tamanend, was a key element of so-called Tammanies, thus the naming of meeting spaces as “wigwams.”)
Buro Happold noted that the dome’s tortoise shell form “reintroduces and reminds us of the Lenapehoking,” the lands historically populated by the Lenape people, which span from eastern Pennsylvania to western Connecticut. Manhattan itself is, of course, part of this homeland, its name adapted from the Lenape Manahahtaan.
Alongside Buro Happold and BKSK, the $57.5 million redevelopment project design team included structural engineering firms Thornton Tomasetti and Weidlinger Associates, geotechnical engineering firm RA Consultants, and MEP firm Dagher Engineering. CNY Group served as the project’s construction manager. The dome’s glass pieces, 750 in total, were designed and produced in Germany, and then shipped to New Jersey for storage before being meticulously crane-set into place under the direction of facade installer Josef Gartner as part of a 14-step process. Structural work on the dome wrapped up last July.
Further technical aspects of the project are detailed in a Facades+ article published while the renovation and expansion of the building were underway.
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Buro Happold and BKSK complete parametric dome topper for Tammany Hall - The Architect's Newspaper
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