text: Reception As one of three office buildings approved in Manhattan during 1974, Citicorp Center received much media attention during its construction. After the design was announced, the architectural writer Ada Louise Huxtable criticized the design in The New York Times, saying that the tower "has neither romanticism nor structural rationalism but, instead, appears to have been painstakingly invented with a tortured logic through a series of pragmatic and esthetic compromises". As the building was being completed, Huxtable took a less harsh tone, saying that it contained a "clear desire for design quality" despite the drawbacks of the form and roof. A writer for the New York Daily News described the building as being a typical New York City office structure that would only attract notice if it were built elsewhere. A New York magazine writer, Suzanne Stephens, stated that the building was simply a modified version of a 1950s skyscraper, considering the rooftop and base to be wasteful with space.
  After the building's completion, it had mixed reception. The architectural critic Paul Goldberger wrote for The New York Times that the roof was unusual and that the building had a reflective facade and a varied form, but that the overall design was not particularly innovative. Another architectural critic, Jack Egan, similarly wrote for The Washington Post that the building had distinctive design features but did not appeal to either nostalgia or novel innovation. Huxtable regarded the plaza as an architectural success but observed in January 1978 that very few people used it. August Heckscher II, a former New York City parks commissioner, described the interior as "an amenity in which we can all rejoice". Nevertheless, Heckscher believed the atrium's silver cladding and light fixtures to be unwelcoming and suggestive of the indoors, and Stephens said that the benefits of the atrium did not transcend class boundaries.