The CitySpire Center is a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on the south side of West 56th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Designed by Helmut Jahn and completed in 1987, it is 814 feet (248 m) tall and has 75 floors, with a total area of 359,000 square feet (33,400 m2). The building is owned by Tishman Speyer Properties.
The CitySpire Center is the 25th-tallest building in New York City and the 42nd tallest in the United States. When completed, the CitySpire Center was the second tallest concrete tower in the United States after the Willis Tower in Chicago. CitySpire Center is part of a cluster of tall buildings near 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, along with Carnegie Hall Tower, the Metropolitan Tower and One57.
The lowest 23 floors of the tower are for commercial use. Above are luxury apartments, which are larger on higher floors. The Moorish-inspired dome, a homage to the adjacent New York City Center on West 55th Street, is illuminated at night with a white light. The building has an octagonal footprint.
The asymmetric octagon dome of this building was designed by ARTECNICS ENGINEERING. This design was changed during construction from vibrationally damped aluminium louvers (by ARTECNICS) to undamped plastic louvers (by OTHERS).Plastic was chosen in order to accommodate low interference with microwave antennas within the dome. Vibrational dampers were omitted on the plastic louvers for an unknown reason. Soon after the building's completion, residents of nearby buildings complained of hearing a loud whistling noise which, it later turned out, came from the wind blowing through the decorative dome at the building's top. The city threatened daily fines for the noise, which lasted for more than a year. Developers silenced the whistle by removing every other louver in the cooling tower, thereby widening the narrow channels through which the wind whistled. Some time around completion, it was revealed that the building exceeded its height limit by around 14 feet (4 m). The developers compensated for this violation by agreeing to build dance studio space for the city's Department of Cultural Affairs on an adjacent site.