Yesterday, I featured the dramatic style and height of the JPMorgan Chase Tower. Today, a peek at the lobby of this gleaming corporate headquarters.

I mentioned that the site required some fancy structural work to create a narrower footprint than the tower above, using fan-shaped columns and triangular bracing. You can see some of that elaborate structure in this photo.

I’m often complimentary about the grand old structures of years past, but that’s not because I inherently like older buildings more. I just find that many modern developments “cheap out” on the detailing. They seem like they are built to a budget dictated by accountants. Not so here. Foster + Partners, the architects of the building, clearly had a generous budget to work with. They’ve built a modern equivalent of those grand stone structures, with considerable attention paid to structure, materials, lighting, and architectural details.

I was across the street when I shot this photo. You can see multiple guards on duty, and I wasn’t planning to raise any suspicions. Luckily, I shot with the compact Leica D-Lux 8, a sufficiently non-threatening camera. If I had a large mirrorless with a hefty telephoto, it might have been a different story.

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