NEWS BUILDING ARCHITECTURE: RAYMOND HOOD AND THE FIRST MODERNIST SKYSCRAPER

The News Building at 220 East 42nd Street, Midtown Manhattan, is one of the pivotal buildings in the history of the American skyscraper — and one of the least celebrated. Designed by Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells and completed in 1930 as the headquarters of the New York Daily News, it was described at the time as the first fully modernistic freestanding skyscraper Hood had designed: a building that stripped away the Gothic ornament of the Tribune Tower that had made Hood's name and replaced it with something radically simpler — bold vertical stripes of white glazed brick and dark window bands running the full height of the tower, uninterrupted by historicist detail, crowned not with a Gothic spire but with a flat, unapologetic top.

The New Yorker, at the building's opening, called the office space "actually a factory, done at factory prices." Hood, who had been given a $150,000 budget for the entrance and lobby — a fraction of what contemporary skyscrapers lavished on their public faces — described his response as "a small explosion of architectural effect." What he produced was one of the most extraordinary interior spaces in New York: a circular rotunda under a faceted dome of black glass, at the centre of which sits a 12-foot rotating globe, partially sunk into the floor, painted with more than 3,000 geographical features and slowly turning on its axis beneath a simulated night sky. It has been doing so for nearly a century.

The building is a National Historic Landmark, designated in 1989. Its exterior and lobby are New York City designated landmarks. And it is, to several generations of Americans who have never set foot in it, the headquarters of the Daily Planet — the fictional newspaper of Metropolis where Clark Kent works as a reporter and Superman works in disguise.

Written by Gavin Paisley, director & model-maker at Chisel & Mouse.
Last updated: April 2026.

Photograph by Hugh Ferriss, in the public domain as per Wikimedia Commons.

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What is the News Building?

The News Building — officially the Daily News Building until the Daily News vacated it in the mid-1990s — is a 36-storey Art Deco skyscraper at 220 East 42nd Street in the Turtle Bay neighbourhood of Midtown Manhattan, completed in 1930. It was commissioned by Joseph Medill Patterson, founder of the New York Daily News, as both the operational headquarters and the physical embodiment of the paper he had built into the largest-circulation daily in the United States.

The building sits one block east of the Chrysler Building and Grand Central Terminal, in a stretch of 42nd Street that was, in the late 1920s, being transformed by a series of major construction projects. The New York Times, covering construction in 1929, described the News Building as one of several developments "radically changing the old-time conditions" along East 42nd Street, alongside the Lincoln Building, the Chanin Building, the Chrysler Building, and Tudor City. In that company, the News Building's radical plainness was its distinguishing characteristic.

It remains in commercial use today, owned by SL Green Realty since 2003. The Daily News moved its operations to 33rd Street in the mid-1990s. The studios and offices of television station WPIX are housed within the building.

Facts panel

Art Deco office skyscraper and newspaper headquarters at 220 East 42nd Street, Turtle Bay, Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Designed 1928–29, completed 1930.

  • Architects: Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells (firm: Hood, Howells & Fouilhoux)
  • Architectural sculptor: René Chambellan (42nd Street entrance bas-relief)
  • Commissioned by: Joseph Medill Patterson, founder of the New York Daily News
  • Completed: 1930
  • Address: 220 East 42nd Street, Turtle Bay, Midtown Manhattan, New York City 10017
  • Height: 476 feet (145 metres)
  • Storeys: 36 (plus 14-storey printing plant wing)
  • Architectural style: Art Deco / early Modernism
  • Structure: Steel frame
  • Exterior materials: White glazed brick piers; red and black brick spandrel panels; polished granite at entrance base
  • Construction cost: $10.7 million (equivalent to approximately $159 million in 2024)
  • Lobby features: Circular rotunda; faceted black glass domed ceiling; 12-foot rotating globe by D. Putnam Brinley; terrazzo-and-bronze compass rose; bronze world distances inscribed in floor
  • Expansion: 1957–60 addition by Harrison & Abramovitz (18-storey east wing; expanded lobby)
  • Original tenant: New York Daily News (until mid-1990s); also United Press International (until 1982)
  • Current owner: SL Green Realty (since 2003)
  • Current tenants include: WPIX television studios
  • Designations: New York City Landmark (exterior, 1981; first-floor interior, 1998); National Historic Landmark (1989)
  • Popular culture: Used as exterior of the Daily Planet building in Richard Donner's Superman (1978) and sequels

Architect: Raymond Hood

Raymond Mathewson Hood (29 March 1881 – 14 August 1934) was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, attended Brown University and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1911. He worked in several architectural offices before establishing his own practice in New York in 1914. For the first eight years, he received almost no notable commissions and at one point designed radiator covers for the American Radiator Company to stay financially solvent.

Everything changed in 1922, when Hood was invited by architect John Mead Howells — whom he had met in Paris — to partner on an entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition. Their neo-Gothic design won, beating entries by Walter Gropius, Eliel Saarinen, and Adolf Loos. Hood was forty-one. The Tribune Tower commission established him overnight as a major American architect, and the commissions followed rapidly.

His subsequent buildings trace the most compressed and consequential stylistic evolution in American skyscraper history: from the Gothic Tribune Tower (1925) to the black-brick Gothic of the American Radiator Building (1924) to the modernist plainness of the Daily News Building (1930) and the McGraw-Hill Building (1931) to the urbane authority of Rockefeller Center (1930–39), where he was the lead architect of a project that would reshape the concept of the city block. This entire trajectory — from historicist pastiche to something recognisably modern — was accomplished in little more than a decade.

Rem Koolhaas, in Delirious New York (1978), identified Hood as the exemplary Manhattanist: a man whose "radical command of the language of fantasy-pragmatism" gave the ambitions of the city "the appearance of objectivity." Hood was called the "brilliant bad boy of architecture" by contemporaries who recognised his restlessness and his indifference to received critical opinion. He died on 14 August 1934, aged 53, of arthritis-related complications — before Rockefeller Center, the capstone of his career, was complete.

The News Building is the hinge of Hood's career: the building at which he decisively left Gothic behind and committed to a modernism that would carry him to Rockefeller Center. It is the building The New Yorker dismissed as a factory and posterity recognised as a landmark.

Architectural character: the striped tower

The News Building's exterior is governed by a single, powerful formal idea: vertical stripes. The tower rises as a series of alternating bands — white glazed brick piers running the full height of the building, separated by dark vertical panels of windows and red and black brick spandrels. There is no ornamental crown. The piers terminate abruptly at the top. The effect is of a tower that is emphatically about going up, and which has no interest in arriving anywhere in particular when it gets there.

Photograph by Epicgenius, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

This was a radical decision in 1929. Most major skyscrapers of the period — the Chrysler Building, one block away, was under construction simultaneously — used their upper sections as opportunities for ornamental display, the setbacks and crowns contributing as much to the skyline as the tower itself. Hood stripped all of that away. The New York Times noted that the white brick piers resembled "tall piles of newspapers" — an apt description, and one that captures both the building's functional logic (it was, after all, a newspaper building, designed partly to house large printing presses on the lower floors) and its architectural character.

The spandrel panels — the sections of wall between the top of one window and the sill of the one above — are the building's one concession to ornament. On the lower floors they carry geometric patterns in relief; on the upper floors they simplify to horizontal bars. The spandrels just below each setback are decorated with miniature setbacks — a small formal joke, the building's stepping form reflected at thumbnail scale in its own surface.

The 42nd Street entrance is the building's great gesture — Hood's "small explosion of architectural effect." Three storeys tall and five bays wide, faced in polished granite, it carries above it a three-storey limestone bas-relief carved by René Chambellan: a dense, sweeping composition depicting the workers of New York City beneath a skyline of skyscrapers, captioned with a phrase from Lincoln: "He Made So Many of Them." Chambellan — who also worked on the Chrysler Building and Rockefeller Center — produced in this relief one of the great pieces of Art Deco architectural sculpture in New York: a composition that celebrates the people who build and inhabit a modern city with an energy and directness that the building's deliberately plain tower reserves entirely for this single moment.

Photograph by Jim.henderson, in the public domain as per Wikimedia Commons.

This is the element that the Chisel & Mouse model captures: the 42nd Street entrance façade with its three-storey bas-relief — the one place in the building where Hood allowed himself, and René Chambellan, to say everything at once.

The lobby: a world at the centre of the world

If the exterior's achievement is restraint, the lobby's is drama. The rotunda at the base of the 42nd Street entrance is among the most astonishing public spaces in New York — and among the least visited, because the building is a working office block with no particular tourist profile, and most people who pass the entrance on 42nd Street have no idea what is behind it.

Hood conceived the lobby as a darkly lit circular space rising to a hemispherical dome of faceted black glass — the ceiling suggesting the black of outer space, the darkness appropriate for a space designed around a single spectacular object. That object is the globe: twelve feet in diameter, painted by D. Putnam Brinley with more than 3,000 geographical features, set partially into a stepped pit six feet below the lobby floor level, and slowly rotating on its axis. Around it, the floor carries a terrazzo-and-bronze compass rose with bronze inscriptions giving the distances from this exact spot to Cairo, the North Pole, Gibraltar, and dozens of other points on the planet.

The implication is unmistakable and magnificently audacious: this is the centre of the world. The newspaper whose building this is covers everything from here. The globe turns; New York stands still.

The lobby was expanded in 1957–60 by Harrison & Abramovitz, who added the east wing and extended the rotunda space. The dome and globe were incorporated into the enlarged lobby with their character intact. The original scientific display cases — eighteen glass cases with charts, maps, and meteorological instruments showing wind velocity, rainfall, and atmospheric pressure — were extended in the same spirit. The result is a lobby that has barely changed in its essentials since 1930, and that continues to attract the attention of everyone who stumbles into it.

Photograph by Elisa.rolle, licenced by CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Daily Planet: from newspaper headquarters to fictional icon

The News Building has a second life that its architect could not have anticipated and that has given it a cultural reach entirely disproportionate to its architectural fame. When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in 1938, they gave him a job at a newspaper called the Daily Planet in a city called Metropolis — and when Richard Donner came to film Superman in 1978, he used the exterior of the Daily News Building as the Daily Planet headquarters, and the lobby globe as the centrepiece of several scenes.

The globe had already appeared in the building's identity: the connection between the rotating globe and a global newspaper's claim to be at the centre of the world was too obvious to miss, and the Daily News had traded on it since the lobby opened in 1930. But Donner's Superman — and the three sequels that followed — introduced the building's silhouette and the lobby globe to a global cinema audience that had no interest in Art Deco architecture and no knowledge of Raymond Hood, and made the globe specifically one of the most recognisable architectural details in popular culture.

It is worth noting, for the record, that Siegel and Shuster based the Daily Planet's name not on the globe in the News Building lobby but on a combination of the Toronto Daily Star and the Globe and Mail — the co-creator Joe Shuster's hometown newspapers. The connection between the fictional Daily Planet and the real Daily News Building is one of coincidence and subsequent reinforcement rather than direct inspiration. It is, nonetheless, now permanent: the building looks like what it looks like, and generations of people who have never heard of Raymond Hood know exactly what that globe means.

Hood and the Art Deco skyscraper

The News Building sits at a specific and important moment in the evolution of the American skyscraper. By the late 1920s, the major forces shaping tall building design were: the 1916 New York Zoning Resolution, which had introduced setback requirements that gave the decade's skyscrapers their distinctive stepped profiles; the influence of European modernism (particularly the stripped classicism of the Vienna Secession and the emerging functionalism of the Bauhaus); and the commercial pressure to maximise rentable floor area while creating buildings that were visually distinctive enough to attract premium tenants.

Hood's response to these forces evolved building by building. The Tribune Tower (1925) was historicist pastiche — extraordinary in its Gothic detail but backward-looking. The American Radiator Building (1924) used black brick and gold terracotta to create a dramatic nocturnal presence. The News Building was something new: a tower that acknowledged the setback rules (the tower rises in a series of stepped masses) but refused to celebrate them with ornament, that used brick rather than limestone because limestone was too expensive, and that found in that economy of means an aesthetic position — the functional, the economical, and the modern as a single argument.

The McGraw-Hill Building, designed simultaneously with the News Building and completed in 1931, pushed the same argument further: horizontal bands, blue-green glazed terracotta, a tower that looked less like a skyscraper of the 1920s than like something from the following decade. Together, the News Building and the McGraw-Hill Building are Hood's bridge from the historicism of the Tribune Tower to the urbane modernity of Rockefeller Center.

The model-maker's lens

The Chisel & Mouse model captures the 42nd Street entrance façade — specifically the three-storey limestone bas-relief by René Chambellan that is the building's one moment of concentrated ornamental expression.

  • Focus — the full three-storey entrance composition: the granite-clad base, the five bays of the entrance, and above them the sweeping bas-relief with its figures of New York workers beneath a skyline of skyscrapers
  • Detail — Chambellan's sculptural composition in the bas-relief: the individual figures, the density of the crowd, the skyscrapers rising behind them, the energy of a composition that compresses an entire city into a single carved panel
  • How it reads at small scale — well, because the bas-relief is fundamentally about composition and rhythm — the arrangement of figures across the surface, the depth of the carving creating shadow — both of which translate directly to plaster form; the three-storey height of the entrance gives the model a strong vertical proportion that reads immediately
  • How to display — best viewed straight on and from slightly below, where the full height of the bas-relief reads as the continuous composition it is; a raking light from one side will bring the depth of the carving into relief and suggest the way the original reads against the New York sky

The News Building is the building Hood made for $10.7 million when everyone else was spending twice that. It is the building where he saved every penny on the tower and spent everything that remained on one entrance and one lobby. And in that decision — in the concentrated ornament of the 42nd Street bas-relief and the spectacular audacity of the globe — is the whole argument: that a building can be modern and economical and still produce something that stops you in the street.

Visiting the News Building

The News Building is a working commercial office building and is not open to the public for general visits. However, the lobby — including the rotating globe and the black glass dome — is accessible during normal business hours on weekdays, and is well worth seeking out. Simply walk through the main entrance on 42nd Street. The lobby is one of New York's great semi-hidden spaces, known to architecture enthusiasts but bypassed by most tourists in favour of the Chrysler Building one block west.

The building is located at 220 East 42nd Street, between Second and Third Avenues in Midtown Manhattan. The nearest subway stations are Grand Central–42nd Street (4, 5, 6, 7, and S trains), one block west. The Chrysler Building, the Grand Central Terminal, and the Ford Foundation Building (Kevin Roche, 1967 — one of the great interiors of 20th-century New York) are all within easy walking distance.

Frequently asked questions about the News Building, New York

What is the News Building?

A 36-storey Art Deco skyscraper at 220 East 42nd Street, Midtown Manhattan, completed in 1930 as the headquarters of the New York Daily News. Designed by Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells, it is recognised as the first fully modernistic freestanding skyscraper of Hood's career, and a National Historic Landmark.

Who designed the News Building?

Raymond Hood (1881–1934) and John Mead Howells (1868–1959), the partnership that had previously won the Chicago Tribune Tower competition in 1922. Hood was the dominant creative force; the building is generally considered his work.

What is the bas-relief above the entrance?

A three-storey limestone sculptural composition by René Chambellan depicting the workers of New York City beneath a skyline of skyscrapers, captioned with a Lincoln phrase: "He Made So Many of Them." Chambellan also worked on the Chrysler Building and Rockefeller Center.

What is in the lobby of the News Building?

A circular rotunda under a faceted dome of black glass, at the centre of which is a 12-foot rotating globe painted with more than 3,000 geographical features, set partially into the lobby floor. The surrounding floor carries a terrazzo-and-bronze compass rose and bronze inscriptions giving distances from the building to world cities.

Is the News Building the Daily Planet from Superman?

The exterior of the News Building was used as the headquarters of the fictional Daily Planet newspaper in Richard Donner's Superman (1978) and its sequels. The lobby globe also features in several scenes. The building's silhouette and the globe are widely recognised as the visual shorthand for Clark Kent's workplace in those films.

Why is the News Building significant architecturally?

It is described as the first fully modernistic freestanding skyscraper of Raymond Hood's career — a building that abandoned the Gothic ornament of the Tribune Tower for bold vertical stripes of white glazed brick with no ornamental crown. Together with Hood's McGraw-Hill Building (1931), it marks the transition in his work from Art Deco historicism to the modernism of Rockefeller Center.

Is the News Building open to the public?

The lobby is accessible during normal business hours on weekdays — walk through the main entrance on 42nd Street. The globe continues to rotate and the black glass dome is intact. The building is not otherwise open for public visits.

Sources and further reading