Former Pepsi-Cola Building

History and architecture

Located on a prominent corner site along Park Avenue, a thoroughfare associated since the 1950s with sleek, understated modern monuments to corporate America, the Pepsi-Cola Building is one of New York's seminal International Style landmarks. Its superb design, innovative technology, and production as a collaborative effort are all qualities for which the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was already famous: design partner Gordon Bunshaft guided the firm's New York office, and Natalie de Blois, among the very few women architects at that time, was the senior designer for the project. Throughout its existence, the building has been praised by architectural critics for its clever siting and gemlike treatment, and especially for its sophisticated curtain wall, a nearly smooth skin of gray-green glass and aluminum spandrels.

Commissioned as an architecturally distinctive corporate symbol of the Pepsi-Cola Company following that organization's astounding success during the 1950s, the building's later occupants similarly have been important businesses, including the Olivetti Underwood Corporation and the ABN-Amro Bank. Despite the addition of a mixed-use tower on the adjacent East 59th Street site (not included in this designation), the original SOM-designed structure remains largely intact.