Sorry, Kids: Disney’s New York Headquarters Is for Grown-Ups

The new 1.2 million-square-foot office building features two towers with multiple terraces. Dave Burk/SOM

On the outside, there are no mouse ears. No dwarf caryatids. No Sorcerer’s Apprentice hat. The new headquarters of the Walt Disney Company at 7 Hudson Square, the Robert A. Iger Building, does not partake of the architectural whimsy of the Magic Kingdom — and nor should it. No one is dreaming up cartoon characters within.

Instead, the all-electric, solar-powered, high-performance building brings together Disney’s news, editorial, streaming and live production divisions under one roof, along with back-of-house departments including advertising, technology and corporate, making the company’s public face more akin to midtown media conglomerates than Burbank creative studios. The building is a stage, not the main character — from the swoop of blonde bentwood in the western lobby, which suggests a pulled-back curtain, to the terraces that give employees and visitors views of the surrounding buildings and, beyond their cornices, the Hudson River.

“Bob Iger was always saying, this is a place people come to be creative, not to balance ledgers,” says Colin Koop, design partner at SOM. The team went through hundreds of different greens before they brought six terra cotta panels to a Manhattan rooftop for Iger’s approval. “We wanted to imply this was a creative company on the façade, confidently but subtly.”