Daily News Building

Plan and section drawings of the globe in the center of a lobby. The plan, on the lower half of the sheet, is a simple series of concentric circles. The section drawing, on the upper half of the sheet, shows a twelve-foot globe mounted at a slight angle on an axis and set into a stepped, sunken pit. Four men appear in the drawing, showing and testing scale and sight lines. Tiny pencil annotations are scattered throughout the drawing and there is a title block in the lower right corner listing the name of the project and the date.

A color photograph of a portion of the lobby with a blue and green-brown globe of the earth in the center. The globe is sunken into a circular pit with stepped sides made of a translucent material that glows and illuminates the globe from below. The pit is surrounded by a simple brass railing of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal bars.

Ludovic Gordon Farquhar, 1899–1945 (Office of John M. Howells and Raymond Hood), revised by Peter Clark (Peter Clark, Inc., set designers)
Daily News Building, “Position of Globe in Circular Pit,” section, July 25, 1929, revised September 3, 1929
Graphite on trace paper
21½" × 17¼"
Raymond M. Hood architectural drawings and papers, 1890–1944, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University

Hood was given $150,000 for ornament throughout the building and decided to spend it all on the lobby.

The floor is inlaid with a giant compass rose pointing out the directions and distances of dozens of cities worldwide, clocks on the wall note the hour across time zones, and maps track changing weather conditions. At the center is a massive, rotating globe that is sunken slightly into a pit and dramatically illuminated from below. Always a fan of theatrical effects, Hood hired a Broadway designer to work on the mechanism and lighting of the globe. The ceiling, a faceted dome of black glass, is a striking contrast to the luminous centerpiece.