50 Hudson Yards - New York City, NY, USA

INTRODUCTION

50 Hudson Yards is a 78-storey, 58 floors above ground skyscraper on Manhattan’s West Side, designed by Foster + Partners for Related Companies and Oxford Properties Group. The tower reaches a height of 981 ft / 299 m, ranking it the 19th tallest building in New York City and the 33rd tallest in the United States. It covers an entire city block and holds almost 3 million square feet of flexible office space, with retail and public space at ground level and a direct underground connection to the adjacent subway station. The LEED Gold tower opened in October 2022 as the final commercial building of the Hudson Yards district.

Its tenants are among the most recognizable names in global business, including BlackRock® and Meta®.

ARCHITECTURE & LIGHTING DESIGN

Foster + Partners set the tower into the New York street grid rather than against it. Expressed structural elements clad in Viscount White stone run the full height of the building, stacked volumes step back as it rises, and the whole composition resolves at the top in a domed stainless-steel installation developed with artist Jamie Carpenter. That dome catches daylight through the day and becomes the building’s signature after dark.

The central lighting task never changed: give 50 Hudson Yards a nighttime identity strong enough to hold its own on the most photographed skyline in the world.

The crown carried that responsibility. Manhattan already has a canon of lit tower tops, and a new one has to earn recognition rather than simply be bright. The design called for dynamic colour capability so the crown could shift for civic occasions, seasonal moments, and building events, while sitting in a restrained neutral state on ordinary nights. Colour had to arrive fully saturated and read cleanly from New Jersey, from the East Side, and from the river, which is a demanding brief at that distance.

Precision governed everything else. Light had to land on the domed structure and stop there. Any spill into the night sky would soften the shape and dilute the effect, and any bounce back into the glazing below would carry into occupied floors. The illuminated form needed sharp edges, because edges are what make a tower recognisable at a glance. The luminaires themselves also had to disappear into the crown assembly, aesthetically resolved rather than tolerated, since the dome is a designed object in its own right and visible equipment would have compromised it.

Lower down, the designers introduced wall sconces at street level and on the 7th and 31st floors. These were placed to support and accent the architectural language of the stone piers, marking the setbacks and giving the base a considered presence for the thousands of people who pass through the plaza and the subway entrance each day. Rather than sit as a separate layer, they were intended to elevate the overall design, extending it from the skyline down to the sidewalk.

A CROWN IN THE SKY

Over 2,964 linear ft / 904 linear m of STR9^® Color Changing wash and graze the crown of 50 Hudson Yards, each unit aimed to a defined position with a controlled beam distribution and anti-glare louvres holding the light where the design intends and keeping the source out of view.

The STR9^® runs are split into two, illuminating the crown with distinctive angles and treatment. Precise aiming, shielding and optical selection is required to achieve the designers vision, without unwanted glare and light spill. This series of luminaries come with the following technologies that enables the success of the installation:

INFINITY^®, GVA’s proprietary 380 V DC power distribution technology, made the electrical strategy for the crown remarkably simple. The entire installation runs from just two centralized 45 kW power supply towers. Operating at higher voltage and lower current means compact cabling covers the full extent of the crown, which massively reduces the number of jumper cables required across the run and keeps facade penetrations to a minimum. No power supplies and no electrolytic capacitors sit inside the luminaires, improving reliability of luminaires where replacing them at almost 1,000 ft in the air is a challenge.

COLOR-AMP^®, GVA’s smart algorithm for maximising lumen output, allocates available power across the colour channels in real time based on which channels are active. Each channel reaches its full potential within safe electrical and thermal limits, which is what allows saturated colour to hold its intensity at skyline viewing distances, and it means less power were needed to meet the desired lumen levels.

UNIBODY^®, GVA’s proprietary sealing technology, gives every unit a single block of extruded aluminium construction with a tempered glass lens and no end caps. IP66 protection with no seams and no path for moisture, which is what a luminaire needs when it spends its life above the Hudson.

The wall sconces were built specifically for this building, based on GVA’s Highlighter^® Series. They are outdoor rated for their exposed positions and were developed with the design team, so the performance and technology of the Highlighter^® platform arrive as an elegant element of the architecture.

RECOGNIZABLE ADDITION TO THE NEW YORK SKYLINE

50 Hudson Yards closes out the Hudson Yards district and takes its place among the tallest buildings in New York. Its crown gives the tower a nighttime identity legible across the region, and the custom sconces bring the same design intent down to the people walking past. GVA is proud to have contributed to both ends of that range on a building that has become a permanent part of the Manhattan skyline.