Look Up: A Gilded NYC Hotel with Some Lusty Sculptures

Image via Complex Original

Rising above the trees of Bryant Park, the peak of the 25 storey American Standard Building, originally the American Radiator Building, stands different from the others with its bright golden glow. Now the home of the Bryant Park Hotel (40 West 40th Street), it was designed by the magnificent duo John Howells and Raymond Hood in 1924 for the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Company, a conglomerate corporation that manufacturers multiple plumbing and heating devices including all those toilets marked “American Standard.”

Howells and Hood, two American architects, first met while studying at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and rose to fame by winning the design competition for the “most beautiful and distinctive office building in the world,” the new headquarters for the Chicago Tribune. This competition was the most popular architectural event of its time and attracted many of the world’s best and brightest architects, including Walter Gropius, founder of the German Bauhaus school, and the utopian modernist Bruno Taut. Though favored by most critics, the design by Eliel Saarinen (architect of the TWA terminal at JFK) came in second placae.

However, the influence of Saarinen’s simplified vision was strongly influential in setting the trends for the subsequent generation of skyscrapers and heavily influenced Howells and Hood in their design for the Radiator Building. In a modern neo-Gothic style, this tower is clad in black brick and gold terra-cotta, representing a pile of coal on fire. The first floor is clad in polished black marble and black mirrors to give it a strong reflection that plays well off the adjacent park. The gold-leaf figures in a band above the first floor, designed by Rene Paul Chambellan as allegorical symbols are quite sultry one with a barely legible tag PASSION. Today, as the luxurious Bryant Park hotel, one hopes this inspires part of what made Conde Nast in 2004 name it one of the “world’s best places to stay.”

Above the trees of Bryant Park.

In 2004, Conde Nast named the hotel one of the “world’s best places to stay.”

The hotel stands 25 storeys high.

The tower is clad in black brick and gold terra-cotta, representing a pile of coal on fire. 

The tower's bright golden glow. 

The most sultry of Rene Paul Chambellan's allegorical symbols.

Another of the gold allegorical statues.

A third.

From toilets to luxury.