The Amazing Spider-Man|Hearst Tower — Oscorp's glass lattice over an Art Deco stump

Stand on Eighth Avenue at 57th Street and look up, and you see the joke the film was in on. The bottom six floors are 1928: limestone, fluted columns, allegorical figures, a Hearst headquarters built as the base of a skyscraper that the Depression cancelled. Then, abruptly, glass. Norman Foster's 2006 tower rises straight out of that old stump in a diagonal steel lattice, the corners cut away so the whole thing looks faceted, like something grown rather than stacked.

This is Oscorp. Not a rendering, not a matte painting — the production shot the building's entrance and lobby as the front door of Norman Osborn's empire, and it needed almost nothing done to it. Peter Parker walks in here with a stolen ID badge and the architecture does the intimidation for him. A corporation that would splice human and reptile DNA should look exactly like this: heritage stone at street level, cold geometry above, no seam in between that anyone bothered to hide.

The lobby is a working office lobby and the turnstiles are real, so the visit stops at the atrium's edge. That is enough. The diagrid reads best from the far side of Eighth Avenue in late afternoon, when the low sun catches the triangles at different angles and the facade stops looking flat.

Location confirmed by movie-locations.com and The Cinemaholic.