The wide array of projects opening soon in New York — from new office towers and flagship stores to the restoration of historic landmarks — reflects the latest innovation from architects.
Consider the JPMorgan Chase office tower under construction in Midtown Manhattan. As one of the first buildings designed under the city's new zoning codes for Midtown East that are intended to promote the development of more trophy office towers, the 70-story steel structure looms over its neighbors on a street already lined with tall buildings.
“It’s interesting just for its sheer scale,” said Gustavo Rodriguez, founder and principal at New York-based architecture firm GR Design Lab. “It’s going to put a lot of pressure on other existing buildings to renovate just to keep competitive.”
Farther south in Manhattan, the renovation of Terminal Warehouse in Chelsea is one of the largest adaptive reuse projects in the city’s history. The design by architecture firm CookFox takes advantage of the former warehouse’s bulk by creating 1.1 million square feet of top-tier office space. In the process, CookFox carved a huge space from the building's center to create a courtyard accessible to the building's office workers.
In some ways, historic industrial buildings create a sense of place simply because of the warm nostalgia people feel toward other eras, Darin Reynolds, an architect and partner at the New York-based CookFox, told CoStar News.
“There’s something important about connecting people who live in New York City today" to the area's history, Reynolds said. “People like historic neighborhoods. They love SoHo, they love the West Village ... these neighborhoods have that authentic character of the past.”
Even as massive projects like the JPMorgan Chase tower and Terminal Warehouse near completion, architects working across all property types are trying to create more approachable spaces, Rodriguez said. He pointed to “smaller-scale boutique office buildings” like 125 W. 57th St. and 1245 Broadway.
“In the recent past, the designs you saw were more utilitarian,” said Rodriguez, whose portfolio from his previous firm, FXCollaborative, includes the proposed 3 Hudson Blvd. at Hudson Yards and 1 Willoughby Square in Brooklyn.
The new innovative looks mean that “now we are seeing the city and developers recognize the value of design as a must-have, as opposed to just something that would be nice to have,” Rodriguez said. “We’re valuing more the beauty of things. Consumers realize they can inhabit spaces, whether at home or work or anything, that are there to celebrate their lives.”
Here is a look at several projects opening soon in New York, across multiple property types and in different areas of the city, with notable designs.
JPMorgan Chase headquarters
Location: 270 Park Ave., Manhattan
Architect: Foster & Partners
Developer: Tishman Speyer
Status: Under construction; opening 2025
Property type: Office
What they are saying:
“The concept for the new design was to create a timeless addition to Park Avenue, which celebrates the city’s iconic architectural history and serves as a powerful new symbol for the next generation of office towers in New York,” according to Foster & Partners.
Description:
With its 70-story tower under construction on Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States and one of the largest lenders for commercial real estate projects, is making a statement that the office is here to stay.
JPMorgan Chase hired the London-based firm Foster & Partners to design its $3 billion tower, across the street from its current headquarters. The bank expects about 14,000 employees will work at the new headquarters.
“The office is not dead and this tower proves it,” said Rodriguez of GR Design Lab, who isn’t involved with the project.
Foster & Partners’ design emphasizes the building’s permanence with dark-brown and bronze-colored steel beams that form triangular bracing that spans the height of the tower. A large public plaza fronting Madison Avenue provides outdoor space for employees to decompress and recharge. An “innovative fan-column structure” makes the building appear to float above street level.
“It’s a wonder of modern engineering,” Rodriguez said.
The Greenwich
Location: 125 Greenwich St., Manhattan
Architect: Rafael Viñoly Architects
Interior designer: MAWD
Developers: Bizzi & Partners, Bilgili Holding, Fortress Investment
Status: Under construction; opening this spring
Property type: Multifamily
What they are saying:
“We decided to slightly curve the corners of the building so you have this perspective view [from inside the residential units] where it’s almost like you’re looking through a camera lens,” Jim Herr, a principal at Rafael Viñoly Architects who's leading the design team, told CoStar News.
“The curved expressions of the corners of the building and the way the interiors embrace these corners is really interesting,” Elliot March, founding partner of interior designer MAWD, told CoStar News. “We didn’t want the interior design to compete with the views.”
Description:
This residential tower is the final design by noted Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly, who died in 2023. Viñoly and his team wanted to design a building that stood out for its elegance but also fit in with the neighborhood’s eclectic assortment of architecture, Herr said. Within a couple blocks of The Greenwich are the glass tower of One World Trade Center, Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus and the marble-clad Perelman Performing Arts Center.
RVA deployed concrete I-beams and rotated them 90 degrees to provide structural support to withstand high winds and to create panoramic views for residents. Curved windows add to the elegance and create the impression of looking through a camera lens when inside a residential unit, Herr said.
Terminal Warehouse
Location: 271 11th Ave., Manhattan
Architect: CookFox
Developers: L&L Holding, Columbia Property Trust
Status: Under construction; first phase opening in 2025
Property type: Office, retail
What they are saying:
Train cars once ran the length of the ground floor inside the Terminal Warehouse building in Chelsea, carrying freight unloaded from ships docked on the Hudson River.
That connection to Manhattan's freight-railroad era provided a major design feature for CookFox, the architect for the adaptive reuse project. Train tracks are visible through a glass covering in the ground-floor corridor, a tribute to the building's history. The ground floor now serves as the main pedestrian corridor connecting office tenants to the entry doors, restaurants and shops that occupy the first floor, CookFox's Reynolds told CoStar News.
"These are windows into the past," Reynolds said.
Description:
One of the largest adaptive reuse projects in New York City history, developers L&L and Columbia Property Trust have preserved one of the many hulking warehouses that once lined the western edge of Manhattan along the Hudson River. The project is expected to create 1.1 million square feet of office space in a warehouse that opened in 1891, along with ground-floor retail and restaurants. The project was a finalist in the 2025 Mipim awards for conversion project of the year.
The project included the removal of a major section of the building’s interior to create a courtyard and new construction on top of the portion of the building nearest the Hudson River. The CookFox design team took additional steps to preserve the building’s history. Those steps include the hiring of scientists to examine the timber used in the building’s construction. They determined that some of the timber dated back to the 1530s.
“That’s 40 years after Columbus sailed here,” Reynolds said. “This building has a history that’s as long as America.”
Penn 2
Location: Two Penn Plaza, Manhattan
Architect: MdeAS
Developer: Vornado Realty Trust
Status: Some phases opened with full opening this year
Property type: Office
What they are saying:
The Penn 2 project was an exercise in “how to make the old seem new again,” Mike Zaborski, an architect and principal at MdeAS, told CoStar News.
Description:
The renovation and expansion of the 1.8 million-square-foot Penn 2 office building was a complicated project set in one of Manhattan’s busiest spots for travelers, sports and concert fans, shoppers and commuters. The project involved the renovation of the original, mid-century modern office building, the construction of a new office building with a canopy-covered entrance that spans the entire Seventh Avenue block and the reorganization and improvement of separate entrances to Madison Square Garden and Penn Station.
Penn 2 now has a bright facade, plenty of windows, an observation deck that spans the entire roof and improved energy efficiency, Zaborski said.
A new canopy-covered entrance plaza called the Bustle that serves as the central visual feature spans the entire block 50 feet above the streetscape. Despite its large size, it’s well-illuminated because of an LED lighting display “that transforms it into a magical space,” Zaborski said.
The project involved an extremely complex schedule because the various entrances to Madison Square Garden, Penn Station and the office building all had to remain open during construction. “That was one of the major constraints we had with the design,” he said. “Solving it was the first piece of the puzzle.”
The floors of the new structure hold offices that span the entire building with floor-to-ceiling windows on all sides. On the building’s rooftop is an expansive deck that provides views of surrounding Midtown Manhattan. Corner offices also have balconies with their views. As of late March, Vornado was in talks with several unidentified potential tenants for the offices, according to a firm spokeswoman.
Waldorf Astoria
Location: 301 Park Ave., Manhattan
Architect: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Developers: Dajia Insurance Group, Strategic Hotels & Resorts, Hilton Hotels & Resorts
Status: Under construction; opening in 2025
Property type: Hospitality, multifamily
What they are saying:
“This is much more than a new interior decoration of a renovation,” said Frank Mahan, principal and leader of the adaptive reuse practice group at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
“It’s almost an entirely new building within the existing structure," Mahan told CoStar News.
Description:
The Waldorf Astoria has been closed for eight years, but now the art deco landmark on Park Avenue is almost ready to reopen. What visitors will find will at once seem completely new yet also serve as a reminder of the iconic status of the property that opened in 1931, according to Mahan.
Once a 1,400-room hotel, now only the bottom half of the Waldorf Astoria is a hotel with 375 rooms. The top half are 375 condominiums. The conversion involved redesigning the layout for virtually the entire building, both its hotel and full-time residential components, Mahan said. The process also included reorienting the building’s main entrances, such as the construction of a porte-cochere for hotel guests and a separate, exclusive porte-cochere for residents. At the same time, designers and owner Hilton took great pains to preserve and reclaim certain features of the original property.
Leica Camera
Location: 406 W. 13th St., Manhattan
Architect and interior designer: Format Architecture Office
Developer: Aurora Capital Associates
Status: Opened in 2024
Property type: Retail
What they are saying:
“This building has one of the smallest frontages in the Meatpacking District,” Andrew McGee, co-founder of Format Architecture Office, told CoStar News. “There are all these hotels and other high-rises and this building was kind of stuck between them and nobody really knew what to do with it. It sat here and fell into disrepair.”
The former red brick facade, which McGee said was “falling apart,” was replaced with a tan-colored brick structure with a series of small openings that “revolved around the idea of the aperture function of a camera.” The appearance of the facade changes at night when lighting from inside the store flows through the openings.
Description:
Germany’s Leica, a legendary maker of cameras favored by professional photographers, chose a nondescript small industrial building in the Meatpacking District for its first flagship store in the U.S. After conversion by New York’s Format Architecture Office, the 3,800-square-foot building now includes a showroom for Leica’s products as well as a gallery for photography exhibits and a space for hosting events for the art world.
One Times Square
Location: 1 Times Square, Manhattan
Architects: S9 Architecture, SLCE
Developer: Jamestown Properties
Status: Under construction; opening fall 2025
Property type: Specialty
What they are saying:
“Having been unoccupied for years, One Times Square will undergo a dramatic transformation … redefining the building’s identity while reinforcing its history,” according to S9 Architecture.
Description:
A New York tower that’s the center of attention once a year — One Times Square — is getting a much-needed facelift. The location of the Times Square Ball drop on New Year’s Eve, the 22-story building is easy to overlook on television and by New York pedestrians thanks to multiple alterations to its exterior over the decades. The renovation is set to create multiple rooftop observation decks, entertainment venues and a Times Square history museum on the inside and new metal-and-glass exterior.
JFK Airport Terminal 6
Location: Queens
Architect: Corgan
Developer: Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, Vantage Group, American Triple I, RXR Realty, JetBlue Airways
Status: Under construction; first phase estimated to open in 2026
Property type: Specialty
What they are saying:
Barry Yanku, aviation studio director at Corgan, said his design was inspired by modern dance. “The dance for JFK Terminal 6 is cohesively threaded by the wing-like structure,” Yanku said. “At each phase of the design process, much like choreography, we considered what the space would feel like and created special moments along the way. Passengers find a variety of memorable moments — vibrant and dynamic and, at times, smaller and subtle — creating a mix of soaring roof blades and triple-height volumes, angled balconies and quieter, intimate holding rooms.”
Description:
Modern architecture has long played a starring role at JFK Airport, from the glass walls of I.M. Pei’s Sundrome terminal to the flying-saucer design of the Worldport terminal, both since demolished. Another notable building, Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal, remains after its 2019 conversion to a boutique hotel. Corgan’s design for the $4.2 billion Terminal 6 may not strike the same visual profile as those landmarks, but the Dallas firm’s creation emphasizes travelers’ comfort and safety, utilizes sustainable building materials and makes the most of its limited space on the airport grounds.
Freshkills Park
Location: Staten Island
Architect: Field Operations
Developer: New York Department of Parks & Recreation
Status: Under construction; first phase opened in October 2023, southern section opened in March 2024, final completion by 2037.
Property type: Specialty
What they are saying:
Field Operations designed the park to “showcase its unusual combination of natural and engineered beauty, including creeks, wetlands, expansive meadows and spectacular vistas of the New York City region, as well as providing much-needed community amenities,” according to the firm.
Description:
The landfills of Staten Island are being transformed into the 2,200-acre Freshkills Park, set to be three times larger than New York’s Central Park once it is complete. Walking and biking trails, green space, public event spaces and a galvanized-steel, wildlife-viewing tower are among its design features. One of the most noticeable elements is an artificial ridge running the length of the park, created for visual impact and to assist stormwater runoff.