Designed by Renzo Piano and Fox & Fowle, the building was developed by the New York Times Company, Forest City Ratner, and ING Real Estate.

The address 260 West 41st Street contained Sussex House, an eight-story, 140-room dormitory,[10] as well as a mural advertising garment store Seely Shoulder Shapes.

[29][30] The developers did not wish to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification,[22][31] since that would have required extra expenditures, such as keeping track of construction debris.

[24] The notched corners contain exposed steel and lack screens, a design feature that represents the ideal of journalistic transparency.

[61] Instead, the corners contain one- and two-story-high rods, which serve as bracing and are designed in a pattern resembling the letter "X" (see The New York Times Building § Superstructure).

Directly underneath the tower portion of the site, the samples generally contained poor-quality weathered and decomposed rock at a depth of up to 70 feet (21 m).

[24] The steel mast atop the building is about 300 feet (91 m) tall[72] and is made of carbon fiber, allowing it to bend during heavy winds without snapping.

[82][83][a] From 2007 to 2024,[84] the ground-floor lobby had an art installation called Moveable Type, created by artist Ben Rubin and statistics professor Mark Hansen.

[47] To encourage interactions between staffers, the offices were generally not assigned to specific workers, and various furniture was scattered throughout; even the staircases are designed as wide-open spaces.

The elevator lobbies on each story have different pieces of contemporary furniture, as well as a set of ten video screens that display images from that day's newspaper.

[65] Lessees within the upper portion of the Times space, such as law firms Goodwin Procter and Seyfarth Shaw, decorated their offices with more ornate finishes to attract clients.

Since law firms generally did not require the open-plan layouts that the Times used, Gensler modified the upper stories' floor-plate dimensions to accommodate more attorneys in the same space.

[9] The Urban Development Corporation (UDC), an agency of the New York state government, had proposed redeveloping the area around a portion of West 42nd Street in 1981.

[105] David Morse and Richard Reinis were selected in April 1982 to develop the mart,[104][105] but they were removed from the project that November due to funding issues.

[9][114][115] Though the site was highly visible due to the low stature of the Port Authority Bus Terminal to the west, it was also at the extreme corner of both the traditional Times Square area to the north and the Garment District to the south.

'"[115][130] In September 2000, four architects submitted bids for the new tower's design: Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, César Pelli, and the partnership of Frank Gehry and David Childs.

[140][141] At the hearing, many large landlords expressed their support for the new Times headquarters, citing the loss of office space that had been caused by the collapse of the World Trade Center during the attacks.

[127] Piano had originally intended to include an open piazza at the base, but the revised plans called for a tower rising directly from Eighth Avenue, with the Times newsroom surrounding a garden.

[144] Paul Goldberger wrote that the building, the largest New York City development proposed since the September 11 attacks, "would have drawn plenty of attention even if it had been just another corporate box".

[140] Gary Barnett of Intell Development, one of the landowners on the site, filed a lawsuit that December, alleging that the Times had engaged in "fraud, bad faith, and collusion against the taxpayers of the city" by taking tax breaks.

[152] In mid-2003, Forest City announced it would request $400 million in tax-free Liberty bonds, allocated for September 11 recovery efforts, to finance the building's construction.

[64] Forest City's executive vice president MaryAnne Gilmartin said the development would conclude a revitalization of the western extremities of Midtown Manhattan.

By then, ten of the eleven former landowners were requesting that the city and state governments give them additional compensation, as they alleged their land had been seized at well below market value.

[165] The building still had several hundred thousand square feet of vacant office space, in part due to the higher rent in Midtown compared to Lower Manhattan.

[168] Real-estate industry executives also expressed uncertainty that architectural renderings of the ceramic curtain wall, and the site's location near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, would be a drawback for tenants.

[46][176] Simultaneously, Forest City also announced its intention to buy ING's stake in the ground-story retail and upper-story office space.

[46] By late 2006, there was strong demand for office space in the building, particularly among law firms,[98] and the Times had hired CBRE Group to market the 23rd to 27th stories.

[182] Times reporter David W. Dunlap wrote that Piano had described the new building as having "lightness, transparency and immateriality", which intentionally did not fit the traditional image of the "old-fashioned newspaper".

[40][189] Piano supported the modifications,[57] but he said that climbing was not even a consideration during the planning process, even though Times executives had focused extensively on reducing the tower's vulnerability to terrorism.

[50] By the end of that year, the New York Times Company was facing financial shortfalls and sought to mortgage its building to refinance debt.