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Article about the building I came across....
http://www.6sqft.com/great-game-chan...-architecture/

Just a couple of excerpts:

According to James Trager in his 1990 book, “Park Avenue, Street of Dreams,” William Zeckendorf, head of Webb & Knapp Inc., proposed in 1954 an 80-story, 4.8 million-square-foot tower, 500 feet taller than the Empire State Building which would replace Grand Central Terminal.

The pinched-cylinder design by I. M. Pei, perhaps his finest, was, however, quickly abandoned, but the next year Erwin S. Wolfson, head of the Diesel Construction Company, proposed a considerably smaller tower on the present site of the MetLife Building.......

.....in 1958, Emery Roth & Sons came forward with another design for Wolfson, a 50-story, three million-square-foot tower with a helipad and parking for 2,000 cars.

....The building, they continued, which was then called the Grand Central City Building, was to be clad in aluminum and glass and the “north-south tower rising from the base would not be significantly wider than that of the New York Central Building” and “would thus cause a minimal disruption of the vista up and down Park Avenue.”

In “New York 1960, Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial,” Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman...... noted, however, that “Wolfson felt uncomfortable with the modesty of the Roth design” and “asked Richard Roth to suggest a few possible design collaborators.” Roth suggested Walter Gropius, who in turn suggested Pietro Belluschi, the authors noted.

.....In 1959, the three architects came up with a revised plan of a larger building with an “elongated” octagonal plan and a very bold pre-cast concrete facade. Stern, Mellins and Fishman observed that the new design was based on “a well-known prototype, Le Corbusier’s unrealized skyscraper for Algiers (1938-42)” and was “also related to Gio Ponti and Pier Luigi Nervi’s technologically innovative, far more sveltely proportioned Pirelli Building, then under construction in Milan.”

This was the I.M.Pei proposal mentioned above:

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Grand Central City proposal by Emery Roth and Sons:

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Le Corbusier's Algiers proposal:

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Pirelli building:

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