Pan Am Building (West Elevation) 200 Park Avenue, New York — completed 1963 The fifty-nine-storey slab rising above Grand Central Terminal, designed by Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi with Emery Roth & Sons. Conceived as the largest commercial office building in the world at its completion, its octagonal plan and precast concrete cladding broke decisively with the glass curtain walls of postwar Midtown. Few buildings of the twentieth century have provoked sharper debate: critics objected to its scale, its siting above one of the city's great civic monuments, and its termination of the Park Avenue corridor — a controversy that helped catalyse the New York preservation movement of the 1960s. Renamed the MetLife Building in 1981. Walter Gropius, Pietro Belluschi, and Emery Roth & Sons, architects.