Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has designed some of the world's most beautiful skyscrapers, often sheathed in curtain walls of floor-to-ceiling glass. But glass wasn't an option for one of its latest projects—an emergency call center in the Bronx that brings together response workers from multiple New York City agencies. Completed last year, the $800 million building needed to be able to withstand all manner of disasters. It is, essentially, a bunker.

Windows had to be few and far between. But that didn’t stop SOM from making the building beautiful. The firm covered it in brushed-aluminum panels, arranged in a saw- tooth pattern. The serrated surface provides soft, pixilated reflections of the sky, which change throughout the day. Without any obvious indicators of scale, the perfect cube, which spans more than 450,000 square feet and rises 240 feet (the equivalent of 24 stories), suggests a sculptural object of indeterminate size.

Conceived by Case, the design research laboratory of SOM in collaboration with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a living wall cleans the air.

By angling the structure away from the roads that straddle it, the firm was able to further camouflage its mass. "It's almost magical how rotating it from the street grid changed perceptions of its size," says SOM design partner Gary Haney, who led the project. Earth berms conceived in collaboration with landscape architect Thomas Balsley , meanwhile, surround the facility. Meant to keep it safe, these hills mean the passersby can't see where the building meets the ground. The structure seems to float.

Nearly a decade in the works, the building grew out of New York’s need for a place to backstop its main Public Safety Answering Center, PSAC I, located in downtown Brooklyn. Completed in 2012 as part of an initiative to modernize the city’s emergency-response system—barely updated since the 1960s—that project united dispatchers from the fire department, police, and medical services in one space for the first time, equipping them with shared, state-of-the-art technology. The facility can handle up to 50,000 calls per hour, more than nine times the peak volume on September 11, 2001.

The Bronx project, PSAC II , can do everything the Brooklyn center does, adding a necessary layer of redundancy— and with generators and large supplies of food and water, it can operate self-sufficiently for up to 72 hours. It was shepherded by the city’s Department of Design and Construction , which in recent years has completed a number of architecturally significant buildings, including a sculptural Manhattan salt shed by Dattner Architects and WXY Architecture + Urban Design . Current projects include a library by Steven Holl Architects , nearing completion in Queens, a Brooklyn rehouse by Studio Gang , and a police station in the Bronx by Bjarke Ingels Group.

Clad in aluminum panels, the building is ringed by grassy berms created in collaboration with landscape architect Thomas Balsley.

If SOM’s goal for the outside of PSAC II was to make the building seem smaller than it actually is, the goal inside was to make spaces welcoming to those who work long, stressful shifts answering calls. The firm covered some interior surfaces with rustic oak, and to make up for the lack of fresh air, one main corridor features a plant wall. The specimens are positioned so that air circulates through their roots, where it is cleaned in an experimental phyto- remediation system. From the cafeteria, meanwhile, those few carefully placed windows frame the back of the berms. Amazingly, says Haney, “it feels as though you’re in a vast expanse of green.” As a 911 call center, the building is about things that go wrong. But its design is very, very right.

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