The impending renovation of the 1967 Ford Foundation headquarters in Manhattan presents an unusual dilemma: the very elements that distinguish this landmark of Midcentury Modern architecture are those that threaten it. Among the earliest major works of the office of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates (KRJDA), the steel, granite, and glass edifice spares little expense to express the munificence of the Ford Foundation, which was, and remains, among the world’s most prominent philanthropic institutions. Given an AIA 25-year award in 1995 and granted landmark status in 1997, the foundation headquarters appears over and over in the pages of Architectural Record, first in a cover story from February 1968. In that piece, Jonathan Barnett wrote that the building at 320 East 43rd Street, near the United Nations, projected “ritual, hierarchy, and immense power.”
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