Daily News Building Architectural Model

This architectural object is inspired by the Daily News Building at 220 East 42nd Street, Midtown Manhattan — a 36-storey Art Deco skyscraper designed by Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells, completed in 1930 as the headquarters of the New York Daily News. Hood built the tower with deliberate economy — brick instead of limestone, no ornamental crown, no Gothic tracery — and concentrated his entire ornamental budget on a single moment: the entrance on 42nd Street.

That entrance is what this object captures. Above a five-bay granite base, sculptor René Chambellan carved a three-storey limestone bas-relief depicting the workers of New York City beneath a skyline of skyscrapers, captioned with a Lincoln phrase: "He Made So Many of Them." It is one of the great pieces of Art Deco architectural sculpture in New York — a composition that compresses an entire city into a single carved panel, and the one place in a deliberately plain building where Hood allowed himself, and Chambellan, to say everything at once.

The building is a National Historic Landmark. It is also, to generations who may never have heard of Raymond Hood, the headquarters of the Daily Planet — the building used as Clark Kent's workplace in Richard Donner's Superman (1978) and its sequels.

Read the full Daily News Building architecture guide

 

Hood's $150,000 explosion of architectural effect, distilled into form

 

Raymond Hood described the entrance budget — $150,000, set against a total construction cost of $10.7 million — as "a small explosion of architectural effect." He spent it with the precision of someone who understood exactly what he was doing. Every penny of ornament in the entire building is here, on this façade, in this relief.

This architectural model focuses on the elements that define the entrance composition:

• the three-storey granite base — five bays wide, the full weight of the building's public face concentrated at street level
• Chambellan's bas-relief above: the individual figures of New York workers, the density of the crowd, the skyscrapers rising behind them, Lincoln's words running across the top — a composition whose energy and depth reward close reading at any scale
• the relationship between the solid granite surround and the carved relief surface

Reduced to object form, this entrance composition allows the architectural argument of the Daily News Building — that a modern building could be economical and plain and still produce something that stops you in the street — to be understood in a single glance.

 

Why the Daily News Building entrance works as an architectural model

 

The entrance translates with particular richness into object form because its design is governed by:

• compositional density — Chambellan's bas-relief is a piece of sculpture whose arrangement of figures, depth of carving, and narrative energy all survive reduction to plaster form; there is enough in it to reward looking at
• the contrast between the plain granite surround and the carved relief surface — a tension between restraint and elaboration that is as clear at model scale as it is on 42nd Street
• strong vertical proportion — the three-storey height of the entrance gives the object a commanding presence on a shelf or desk
• the Lincoln caption as a textual element — words carved in stone that give the object a layer of meaning beyond pure form

At model scale, the Daily News Building entrance reads as what it was designed to be: the one moment of concentrated expression in a building that saved everything else for this.

Rather than functioning as a literal miniature, this object captures the architectural character of the Daily News Building entrance.

 

Craft, materials, and finish

 

Each Daily News Building object is crafted with particular attention to the sculptural depth of Chambellan's bas-relief — the individual figures, the layers of the composition, and the way the carved surface catches a raking light. The finish is pale and smooth, close to the polished granite and limestone of the original, allowing light from one side to bring the depth of the carving into relief and suggest the way the entrance reads against the New York sky.

The window frames and door are made of etched brass, reflecting the bronze detailing of the original entrance and lobby.

The result is an object that sits naturally within:

• architectural and design studios
• curated interiors and bookshelves
• the home of anyone who has walked past 220 East 42nd Street and looked up

It appeals to architects, lovers of Art Deco and American modernism, New York enthusiasts — and the rather large audience who know this building as the Daily Planet and have always wanted to know more about it.

 

A building with two identities

 

The Daily News Building has always had two audiences: those who know it as Raymond Hood's pivotal step from historicism to modernism, the building that pointed the way to Rockefeller Center; and those who know it as the Daily Planet — the fictional newspaper headquarters of Metropolis, the building where Clark Kent files his copy.

Both identities are real and both are earned. The building's vertical stripes and flat top were genuinely radical in 1930, a declaration that the American skyscraper could be modern in the European sense, shorn of Gothic ornament and answering only to its own structural logic. And when Richard Donner needed a building that looked like the headquarters of a great metropolitan newspaper — powerful, purposeful, unmistakably of the city — he chose this one. The choice was not arbitrary. The Daily News Building looks exactly like what it is.

As an object, both histories are present. This is a model of a building that changed American architecture and that has spent the decades since being recognised, by entirely different audiences, for entirely different reasons.

 

Product details

 

• Subject: Daily News Building (News Building), 220 East 42nd Street, Turtle Bay, Midtown Manhattan, New York City 10017 (42nd Street entrance façade and bas-relief)
• Architects: Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells; architectural sculptor René Chambellan
• Architectural style: Art Deco / early Modernism
• Completed: 1930
• Designations: National Historic Landmark (1989); New York City Landmark (exterior 1981, lobby 1998)
• Materials: Plaster, etched brass window frames and door

 

Learn more about the Daily News Building

 

For the full story — Raymond Hood's career from the Chicago Tribune Tower to Rockefeller Center, the logic of the striped façade, Chambellan's bas-relief and its Lincoln caption, the globe that positions this building as the centre of the world, and the Superman connection — see our in-depth architecture guide:

Daily News Building Architecture: Raymond Hood and the First Modernist Skyscraper