Ford Foundation Building

The Ford Foundation Building is a twelve-story office building in East Midtown Manhattan, completed in 1967 and designed in a late modernist style by the architect Kevin Roche together with his engineering partner John Dinkeloo, commissioned as the headquarters of the Ford Foundation, then the largest private philanthropic foundation in the United States. Its defining feature is a vast glass-enclosed atrium garden rising the full height of the building, planted with mature trees and shrubs, around which the office floors are arranged so that most workspaces look inward onto the greenery rather than outward onto the street. The building was an early and influential example of using a large interior atrium as the organizing space of an office building, a device many later corporate headquarters would imitate. Its combination of a plain granite and glass exterior with a lushly planted interior core made it one of the most admired corporate office buildings of its era.