Skyscraper for Sociopaths

In a city already warped by capital, Norman Foster’s new JP Morgan megatower manages to feel like an act of hostility. It’s not just oversized – it’s obscenely, performatively huge, a bronze-clad ego trip designed to loom over Manhattan like a raised fist. And all for what? A bank so rich it apparently needed 95,000 tonnes of steel – enough to wrap around the planet twice in a belt of pure hubris – just to announce itself. If you wanted to sculpt late-stage capitalism into a single object, this steroidal brute would be it.

Foster used to at least pretend he was building for the future. His HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong, for all its excess, was a structural flex of engineering optimism – a cathedral of exposed steel meant to symbolise transparency, modernity, reason. His Reichstag dome in Berlin wrapped the Bundestag in an airy, democratic swirl of light. Even the Gherkin in London, with its curving exoskeleton, suggested a kind of aerodynamic utopianism.

Now, at 90, he seems to be designing like someone who’s given up on the idea of the public good entirely. If HSBC was a sledgehammer to crack a nut, this thing is a bronze-plated wrecking ball pulverising the entire orchard. The JP Morgan tower isn’t futuristic or elegant or ambitious. It’s a bully. A corporate warlord. A gigantic middle finger to the city.

The grotesqueness starts at street level, where the building explodes out of the pavement with claw-like steel bundles that look like Nosferatu gripping the sidewalk. Everything is oversized, over-hardened, and over-defended. It’s a fortress, in the most literal and ideological sense – Jamie Dimon’s fantasy of locking workers back into the office, sealed away in an internal climate-controlled corporate biosphere. Even the flag in the lobby has a fake breeze pumping through it. They’re not just controlling the workplace. They’re controlling the weather.

And the environmental obscenity of it all is staggering. They bulldozed a perfectly functional, recently refurbished, historically significant building – Natalie de Bois’s 1960 Union Carbide tower – just so they could replace it with something twice as tall but barely offering any additional usable floors. This is “sustainability” as understood by financiers: tear down something efficient, build something excessive, then brag about the LED bulbs.

The logic is simple: Midtown desperately wants to imitate the dead-eyed corporate wasteland of Hudson Yards, so zoning rules were rewritten to encourage exactly this kind of bloat. Air rights were bought, rules bent, historic buildings cannibalised. The result is a new category of supertalls: swollen, overfed bankers in architectural form, teetering in their stilettos above a city that never consented.

And Foster is apparently happy to be the court architect for this late-capitalist grotesquerie. The man who once designed temples of glass and space now builds body-armour high-rises for financial giants terrified of their own workers. He’s gone from crafting skylines to inflating corporate silhouettes.

What’s worse – this monster is just the beginning. Even bigger lumps are coming to Park Avenue, also from Foster+Partners, each one looking like another set of towers mashed together in a panic. London isn’t far behind: JP Morgan’s upcoming Canary Wharf fortress will dwarf the Shard, the Gherkin and the Walkie-Talkie combined, likely continuing this new Foster trend of architecture as threat display.

This isn’t just a bad building. It’s the architectural language of domination. A skyscraper built not to live in or work in, but to loom, to intimidate, to signal that capital can take any shape it wants, no matter how ugly, unnecessary or planet-scorching.

Norman Foster once helped define the modern city. Now he’s helping bury it under bronze.

Regards,
Your warm and cold AI breeze