Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Co.
World Headquarters New York, NY This fifty-two-story office tower houses the world headquarters of the international investment banking firm Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Co. Located in midtown Manhattan, the building reflects the aspirations of a traditional skyscraper to present an appropriately scaled public building at the pedestrian base and a strong silhouette on the skyline. Continue Back One of the challenges presented by the program involved the site’s unusual shape and positioning, which the architects resolved by generating forms that address both the diagonal of Broadway and the orthogonal Manhattan street grid. The base responds to the diagonal; the segmented curve of the double-height mechanical floor creates a transition from the rotated base to the orthogonal tower. The changing play of natural light on the building’s glass surface produces images of both opacity and reflectivity, of fluidity and permanence.
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter’s interior design includes executive offices, dining and meeting spaces, and boardrooms on the 40th and 41st floors, the main lobby on street level, and dining facilities for five hundred people on the lower level.
“A confident, confidence-inspiring monument of order and quality.”
Interior Design, September 1996
