Annabelle Selldorf’s Latest Design For Steinway & Son

How The Architect Created A Harmonic New Headquarters In Uptown Manhattan For The World-renowned Piano Makers

By Sarah Medford

February 29, 2016
Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, Lang Lang: These are just a few of the pianists who played at the majestic Beaux-Arts building that Steinway & Sons occupied for 89 years on Manhattan’s West 57th Street, one block away from Carnegie Hall. But in April, Steinway is taking its big-shouldered concert grands nearly 15 blocks south to a new home that architect Annabelle Selldorf has retooled into a 19,000-square-foot space with an airy showroom and her first-ever performance hall.


“We only move every hundred years, so we had to get it right,” says Steinway CEO Michael Sweeney. He approached Selldorf after admiring the resonant public spaces she has designed, including New York’s Neue Galerie museum and Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner galleries. Pianos, it turns out, share certain spatial requirements with large works of art.

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