The Amazing Spider-Man 2|Hearst Tower — the glass honeycomb that plays Oscorp

Max Dillon comes through the doors with an armful of blueprints and nobody looks at him. That is the whole point of the scene, and the building does half the work: a lobby so tall and so bright that a man carrying paper across it becomes furniture. Marc Webb shot Oscorp's front door at 300 West 57th Street, where the Hearst Tower stands.

Look at it from the corner of Eighth Avenue and you can see the joint. The bottom six storeys are limestone and cast stone with allegorical figures at the parapet — the Hearst Magazine Building, finished in 1928 to a design by Joseph Urban, built as the base of a skyscraper the Depression cancelled. Seventy-eight years later Norman Foster finished the job. The glass tower rising out of that hollowed-out shell is a diagrid: triangles four storeys tall, corners bitten off, no vertical columns at the edges at all. It went up using roughly twenty per cent less structural steel than a conventional frame, and it was the first office tower in the city to earn a LEED Gold rating.

The Oscorp lobby Peter walks into is not in here. That was a three-storey set built inside an armory across the river in Williamsburg. What is real is the atrium behind the limestone, where a water sculpture called Icefall runs three storeys down cast-glass panels beside a wide diagonal escalator — the closest thing in New York to a corporate cathedral, which is precisely what a company like Oscorp needs.

Stand on the 57th Street side and find the line where Urban's stone stops and Foster's glass starts. Every establishing shot of Oscorp in this film is built on that seam.

Photograph by Mariano Mantel, CC BY-NC 2.0, via Flickr.