Fitting a city within a building

Deutsche Bank Center, originally known as Time Warner Center, brings an array of urban amenities into a single building at a prominent corner of Central Park. It encompasses five levels of retail and restaurants, a performing arts center, condominiums, a hotel, and offices, along with direct access to subway service and underground parking. For more than a decade, the building housed CNN’s New York television studios. Its health club was among the largest ever built at the time, and its lower level became New York City’s first Whole Foods.

To knit this diverse array of functions together, the design is composed of several distinct forms that moderate the building’s scale while alluding to the landmark residential towers of the Upper West Side.

Built to replace the New York Coliseum—a windowless convention hall that quickly became outdated—the building’s form deftly responds to its urban context. A stone-and-glass base, following the curve of Columbus Circle, is topped with two trapezoidal towers. The base houses the retail and production studio components, while the towers contain offices, the hotel, and residences. Culminating in luminous glass and steel crowns, the twin-towered design echoes the historic apartment buildings which line Central Park West.

Situating the building within the city

Columbus Circle marks a singular moment in the Manhattan street grid, as the place where the diagonal of Broadway meets the corner of Central Park. SOM’s design enhances each one of these defining urbanistic features. The street grid extends visually into Deutsche Bank Center’s street-level arcade of shops, with a large cable net wall that is perfectly aligned with 59th Street. This glass facade rises to the Jazz at Lincoln Center performance venues above, offering theatergoers dramatic views above the street. Higher up, the gap between the towers opens sightlines down 59th Street.

The base of the building echoes the curve of Columbus Circle, positioning the Deutsche Bank Center to face the entrance to Central Park. Moving up the building, the curvature is resolved into angular forms at the tower level. The front of each tower aligns with Broadway, which passes from the southeast side of the circle to the northwest.

A pivotal project’s enduring legacy

By responding to the complexity of the surrounding streets and the huge number of programs within one structure, SOM’s design for Deutsche Bank Center solves multiple challenges. It untangles a web of infrastructure underground, creating a better connection to New York’s subway system and three levels of subterranean parking. By providing more than 300,000 square feet of shops along with Jazz at Lincoln Center, offices, a hotel, and residences, the building transformed a dead zone into a destination—proving for New York that a large-scale, mixed-use building could be greater than the sum of its parts and inspiring future developments throughout the city.

Repositioning: From Time Warner to Deutsche Bank

About a decade and a half after the Time Warner Center opened its doors, Deutsche Bank moved its New York headquarters to Columbus Circle. Deutsche Bank and Related Companies, the owner of the complex, tasked SOM with renovating 1.1 million square feet, from the office lobbies and elevators to the repositioning of several office floors. The result is a significant transformation of this workplace—with new outdoor terraces, a vastly improved arrival experience, and modern technology that is enhancing the building’s functionality and performance.