General Motors Building, 50-floor skyscraper at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, Manhattan, United States.
The General Motors Building is a 50-story, 705-foot (215 m) office tower at 767 Fifth Avenue, occupying the block between Fifth and Madison Avenues and 58th and 59th Streets. Its flat facade is clad in load-bearing vertical piers of white Georgia marble, rhomboid in section, alternating with recessed strips of glass windows that run unbroken from base to flat roof. The ground and second stories were originally glazed with thirty large windows, ten of them among the largest single windows made for a building at the time.
Construction of this building began in 1965 after the Savoy-Plaza Hotel was demolished, with completion in 1968 as General Motors' headquarters. The project represented a major shift in how the Fifth Avenue area evolved during the post-war decades.
The lobby held a General Motors showroom behind thirty windows, ten of them 9 feet wide and the largest single windows made for a building at the time. The space later housed an FAO Schwarz store. The lobby's green-and-white marble walls, green marble floors with brass strips and polygonal ceiling date largely from a 1999 renovation.
The tower is an office building with no public access inside; the ground-floor retail and the Apple Fifth Avenue store occupy the surrounding low structures and the sunken plaza on the Fifth Avenue side. The plaza has planting and seating above ground. The block is bounded by Fifth and Madison Avenues and 58th and 59th Streets, with Grand Army Plaza and Central Park across Fifth Avenue.
In 2008, this building sold for 2.8 billion dollars, among the highest prices ever paid for a single office building in North America. The sale reflected the extraordinary value of its prime Fifth Avenue location.
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