13 Iconic Buildings to Visit in New York City

One of the oldest surviving skyscrapers in New York, the Flatiron Building (originally the Fuller Building) on Fifth Avenue is significant not only in its unusual appearance but also as one of the key buildings in the Beaux-Arts Classicist movement. Its architect, New York–born Daniel Burnham, is better known for his work and plans in Chicago than in his city of birth. In 1873 he formed a partnership with John Wellborn Root that was significant in creating a group of architects and engineers called the Chicago School.

The commercial office tower scheme, named initially after the building’s promoter George Fuller, is situated on a tight triangular site in the Madison Square Park area of Manhattan. Also famed as one of the first buildings to use a steel skeleton, it is constructed in three horizontal sections, like a Greek column, and, unusually for the time, uses extensive elevators. The nickname, Flatiron, comes from its resemblance to the clothing irons used at the turn of the 20th century. At its narrowest point at the very top of its 22-story 285-foot (87-meter) structure, the building is incredibly slim—just 6.5 feet (2 meters) wide.

The Flatiron Building, completed in 1902, is a popular landmark in the New York landscape—so much so that the district it sits in is now named after it. It is a must-see building for its individualism and as one of the early examples of what would become a dramatic and aesthetically very different urban building form: the skyscraper. (David Taylor)

Following the Paris Exhibition of 1925, Art Deco was in full flight. So too was the desire of wealthy building patrons—such as car magnate Walter P. Chrysler—to have the tallest possible landmarks shout out their names. The convergence of both of these trends gave birth to New York’s Chrysler Building, briefly the tallest building in the world.

(Read Lee Iacocca's Britannica entry on Walter P. Chrysler.)

Designed by William Van Alen and completed in 1930, the tip of this most elegant of New York’s skyscrapers stands some 1,046 feet (319 meters) above the Manhattan sidewalk. The 77-floor tower was quickly eclipsed in height by the Empire State Building, which opened a year later. Entered via a lavish marble and chrome-steel lobby, the building’s most notable stylistic treatment is its silver-colored stone. Its Art Deco upper part is decorated with semicircular stylized Chrysler forms that recall the design of hubcabs, along with radiator-cap and eagle-headed gargoyles at the 61st-floor level. As a sensational construction celebration akin to a waiter whipping off a plate cover in a restaurant, the seven-story spire topping the building was first assembled inside the building, then hoisted into place through the roof opening and secured—all in just one and a half hours. This also served to steal a march on competitors and secure the “world’s tallest” claim.

Brooklyn-born Van Alen was known for his very tall commercial buildings, but the Chrysler Building is the most celebrated. It is a deft and beautiful counterpoise to the more rectilinear skyscrapers that followed it—an instantly recognizable monument, proclaiming the age of the automobile, New York City, and corporate American capitalism. (David Taylor)

The United States spent the 1920s in the midst of a building boom. The first skyscraper was built in Chicago in 1885, and the nation’s cities had been growing taller ever since. At the close of the decade, two of New York’s most affluent citizens, Walter Chrysler of Chrysler Corp. and John Jakob Raskob of General Motors, competed to see who could build the tallest building, resulting in two of the world’s most iconic structures: the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building.

Raskob selected architects Shreve, Lamb and Harmon Associates to design the Empire State Building. His inspiration was a simple pencil, which he stood on its end, asking the architects: “How high can you make it so that it won’t fall down?” By the time construction began in 1930, a Wall Street crash had helped to plunge the United States into the Great Depression. Raskob now wanted his skyscraper to cost the least amount of money possible and to take a maximum of 18 months from drawing board to occupancy. The steel frame rose by four and a half floors every week until, after one year and 45 days, it reached 1,252 feet (381 meters) high, eclipsing the Chrysler Building by 204 feet (61 meters).

Despite the restrictions, architect William Lamb wanted to create a beautiful building as well as a tall one. Lamb produced a tapering tower that still dominates the New York skyline. The building is familiar worldwide, having appeared in innumerable films, including King Kong and An Affair to Remember. It remained the tallest building in the world until 1971. (Justine Sambrook)

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) provides a transparent window into its art collections. The museum, established in 1929 exclusively to show modern art, occupied three different buildings before finally opening at its present location. New York, despite being a vital city in the early 20th century, boasted few truly “modern” buildings until the late 1930s. Most of the steel-framed skyscrapers, which contribute so much to Manhattan’s celebrated skyline, were dressed up in either Gothic or Classical disguise. Although at first only a small building by New York standards, MoMA made a great impact through assiduous propaganda and, of course, its collection of contemporary art.

The original, rather small, building was expanded with an addition designed by rich young dilettante Philip Johnson. He altered the museum in 1951 and 1964, adding the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, an outdoor courtyard where visitors could contemplate sculptural art. Johnson and his mentor, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, had taken a prolonged European tour in 1929, and the buildings they photographed formed the basis for their exhibition, “The International Style,” in 1932. The style of the original MoMA building is a compendium of motifs of the International Style.

Other architects intervened as the collections grew and the expectations of the curators changed. In late 2003 MoMA reopened after a huge refit by Yoshio Tanaguchi with Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. The museum again underwent a large expansion in 2019 that included a complete rehang of its collection. (Eleanor Gawne)

Rockefeller Center is the world’s finest Art Deco civic and commercial urban ensemble and quite probably the most successful and loved public/private space in the United States. It consists of 19 commercial buildings of varying height, form, and purpose on an 11-acre (4.5 hectare) private site. It was conceived as a whole but made allowances for diversity and growth. Completed in 1940 and the only major Depression-era commercial building in New York City, it was the vision of one of the country’s richest men: John D. Rockefeller. He assembled a team of architects who worked collaboratively under chief architect Raymond Hood.

Hood’s plan resembled that of the original 13 colonies of the United States: a nascent federation of independent states that contribute to the strength of the whole. Thirteen satellite buildings—completed within an eight-year span—sacrificed height to consolidate air rights to the 14th. These air rights allowed the GE/RCA skyscraper to soar to 70 stories and create a flagship beacon. This building is a streamlined slab-shaft with a narrow profile that accentuates its verticality. The famous sunken plaza at the base feeds into a grid pattern of buildings and streets that allows a constant stream of visitors to enter and exit. (Denna Jones)

While most of the skyscrapers on Park Avenue jostle one another for space, the Seagram Building stands back coolly from the throng. A plain rectangle with none of the setbacks (recessions in walls made to adhere to zoning codes) that characterize its neighbors, the Seagram has instead an open plaza. Deriving from his experimental models of office towers built in the 1920s, the Seagram Building, completed in 1958, is a realization of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s dream of a tall glass block. Though the impact seen in early illustrations is now somewhat diminished by many hundreds of copies in business districts all over world, the Seagram continues to retain something of its original spirit even in the bustle of present-day New York.

In part, this quality is due to the fanatical care Mies expended on the details of the building; he is often quoted as saying, “God is in the details,” a free adaptation of an aphorism of Thomas Aquinas. The details all contribute to the overall effect. Mies was able to build what he considered a “pure” version of the steel-framed skyscraper.

Some of that impact is due to the careful siting; Mies suggested to Samuel Bronfman, his client, that part of the site be given over to a raised public plaza fronting onto Park Avenue. In a city where land is enormously expensive, it is a show of conspicuous consumption on the very grandest scale. Incorporating the plaza also allowed Mies to avoid adhering to the setbacks that are part of the New York zoning laws, permitting him to make full and inspired use of the space. (Eleanor Gawne)

Frank Lloyd Wright was in his 70s when he received the commission in 1943 to design a museum for the modern art collection of Solomon R. Guggenheim. He worked on the project for 16 years, until his death, at the age of 90, just before its completion. Wright was not a fan of New York, a place he considered overcrowded and overdeveloped, so his design is something of a rebuff to the city of straight-edged buildings. In contrast to its neighbors, the main part of the museum is circular in plan, and from the outside it resembles a giant white funnel that tapers toward its base above a podium. The concrete structure was poured and sprayed on-site as if the building were a massive sculpture. Inside, Wright proposed a gallery where art would be hung on the curved walls of a central ramp that spiralled up through the building to a skylight. Visitors were whooshed to the top of the rotunda in an elevator and then walked back down the ramp along a promenade of art. Niches were provided for separate displays, but even there the walls are not flat, and therefore not ideal for hanging art. In 1992 a large rectangular building by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates was added to the rear of the site to provide additional, and more conventional, gallery space. Although critics and artists are still divided over the Guggenheim’s merits as a museum, it remains one of the world’s most-recognizable and best-loved buildings. (Marcus Field)

Called a “turkey” in a 1964 review and more recently the “world’s greatest urinal,” the sin of 2 Columbus Circle was to be different. Edward Durrell Stone’s exuberant and freestanding 10-story Gallery of Modern Art was enrobed in white Vermont marble, pierced to allow daylight to enter at the corners of each floor. More dots punched a cornice pattern above a two-story English Perpendicular-style course of lancet windows. This solid yet ethereal mass was held aloft by a leggy Moorish-style arcade, which inspired critic Ada Louise Huxtable to dub it the “Lollipop” building.

Calculated neglect and empty possession aided the building’s decline, but words put the boot in. Pejoratives included “romantic,” “airy,” “pretty,” and “eccentric.” It was said that Swiss architect Le Corbusier would have designed a more “manly” building. In 2005 the new owner—an art and design museum dedicated to makers, materials, processes, and visual presence—commissioned a “radical redesign.” Architect Brad Cloepfil, known for “precise, cerebral, and humorless” buildings rather than sympathetic “edits,” stripped the building to its concrete frame. Slits and a canyon carve through to create a “light-filled, cantilevered structure.” Usable space was tripled. The lollipop arcade remains but is jailed behind glazing. Thousands of Royal Tichelaar Makkum iridescent terra-cotta tiles skin the slabs. This finish enables the facade to shift and shimmer.

Huxtable, who derided the original as a “kitschy, frilly bit of nothingness,” believed the new Museum of Arts and Design displays “instant eye candy.” The swinging 1960s are over, but Stone’s building lives on as a plucky “painted corpse.” (Denna Jones)

Among the finest of Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer’s later works in the United States is the Whitney Museum of American Art, an imposing and rather brutal building on New York’s Madison Avenue completed in 1966. This was the third home of the museum that was established in 1931 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to house her collection of modern art.

When considering the form of the new Whitney, Breuer said, “It should be an independent and self-relying unit, exposed to history, and at the same time it should transform the vitality of the street into the sincerity and profundity of art.” To achieve this end, he designed a highly sculptural building that steps out toward the street as it rises, like an inverted ziggurat. The elevations are finished in dark gray granite, and only one window appears on the front facade, a large projecting trapezoid that appears again in six smaller versions along the side elevation. Visitors enter the museum across a bridge, like a drawbridge to a castle, crossing the sculpture courtyard below. Inside, the building is arranged with a split-level lobby and restaurant, on the ground and basement floors, with four floors of art galleries above.

Three schemes to extend the Whitney by Michael Graves, Rem Koolhaas, and Renzo Piano were all scrapped in favor of a new main building, designed by Piano, on a downtown site that opened in 2015. Breuer’s building subsequently became the Met Breuer, but that closed permanently in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving its future, albeit entangled with the Frick Collection, uncertain. (Marcus Field)

Slotting into an awkward site on a narrow Manhattan block, the slender red tower of the Permanent Mission of India to the UN is a Western skyscraper with Indian influences. Charles Correa, the architect, was raised in India but left shortly after independence to study architecture in the United States. Returning home to establish his own practice in Bombay in 1958, Correa developed a vision that fuses the principles of Western Modernism with the styles, materials, techniques, and needs of where he grew up. Although much of his work has been in India, Correa has undertaken a number of commissions in the Americas, of which this, completed in 1993, is perhaps the most striking example.

Rising 28 stories, the red aluminum curtain wall that comprises the tower is surmounted by a massive open-air porch—an allusion to the rooftop barsatis on many Indian homes. As most of the tower is given over to the residential quarters of government employees who work on its lower floors, this reference is entirely appropriate. At the base a darker red granite lobby is entered through bronze double doors, and the open porch is strikingly painted in the colors of the Indian national flag. (Richard Bell)

What looks like a cross between a giant space hopper and a balloon hijacked from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade is tethered within a 333,500-square-foot (30,982-square-meter) glass cube on the edge of Central Park. This showstopper is the Hayden sphere within the American Museum of Natural History’s Rose Center for Earth and Space—a reinvented planetarium that reverses the traditional “me-centered” view of the universe by introducing us to a galactic economy of scale in which humanity assumes the role of a mere speck of cosmic dust. The sphere is a globe of “water white” purified glass, 87 feet (26 meters) in diameter, held together with gaskets that prevent buckling and distortion. The thin trusswork structure is revealed by the glass. The approach to the center, completed in 2000, amazes the viewer and promises an even bigger experience once inside, but the tight fit within means that the scale is best appreciated from the outside looking in.

The circle shape is repeated at the center’s entrance, but it is submerged so only a quarter of its curve appears in anticipation of the full globe inside. The Hayden sphere houses an internal planetarium and “Big Bang” theater. Supported by a tripod base, the sphere is wrapped by a serpentine “Scales of the Universe” walkway. The sphere guides understanding of the relative sizes of galaxies, planets, and stars, many of which appear inside as suspended models. The architecture of the Rose Center mixes steel-and-glass industrial elements with flamboyant touches, such as black flooring that appears to be laced with shimmering galaxy dust and a lighting scheme that throws volumes of blue into the cube to create a night club atmosphere. Allied to a sweeping look-at-me staircase that descends from the balcony, and a penthouse reached by glass elevators, this museum demands your attention. (Denna Jones)

Like the title of James McNeill Whistler’s 19th-century painting of his ethereal mistress, the New Museum in New York City—by SANAA, Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa—is a Symphony in White.

Seven stories of rectangular steel boxes hang off-axis from the building’s central steel core, and the irregular pattern allows for narrow skylights and pop-up vistas along the outer edges. Fluorescent lights augment a shifting supply of daylight. The glass lobby elegantly shoulders its stacked burden. Simple column-free galleries allow freedom and flexibility in the display of artwork.

The three-dimensional diamond-shaped light-diffusing 1⁄4-inch (4-mm) aluminum mesh facade is an off-the-shelf solution commonly used in parking garages (a nice play on the site’s previous function as a parking lot). Light reflects only at the diamond points, ensuring there is no hard reflection. The mesh’s unique aesthetics and controllable contouring are allied to its ability to withstand traffic fumes and weather (including the East River’s semi-salty air), which can pit and corrode other materials. Applied shingle-fashion in frameless sheets, the overall effect is contrary to expectations. (Denna Jones)

The facade of the Storefront for Art and Architecture gallery in Manhattan is ever-evolving. The nonprofit art organization commissioned the architect Steven Holl and the artist Vito Acconci to design the facade in 1993. The panels forming the front of the gallery and shop can be opened in a variety of combinations or can be closed altogether.

The facade of Storefront for Art and Architecture is flat board, with each uniquely shaped panel opening to the street like modern window shutters. The simple brilliance of the idea does not reflect the small budget with which the facade was built. The building becomes flexible, surprising, and intriguing; passersby can catch glimpses of the gallery inside. The panels become a part of the street architecture and blur the line between indoors and outdoors—a familiar concept in a densely built city like New York.

Only the city that boasts the highest, glossiest skyscrapers and a street grid system could have inspired such a gallery facade. When closed, the outlines of the panels are reminiscent of the city’s skyline. Storefront for Art and Architecture is quintessentially a New York–style building. (Riikka Kuittinen)