Donald Trump in 1980, with a model of Trump Tower. Photograph by Don Hogan Charles / The New York Times / Redux

Until some probable twenty-second-century deluge, long after the battle of this election year is lost and won, the building now called Trump Tower will stand at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and East Fifty-sixth Street. Not since Thomas Jefferson at Monticello or William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon has someone so near the summit of American political life been so closely identified with a single structure. And because Trump, in his rise to prominence as the Republican Presidential nominee, has been so protean and labile, it’s tempting to believe that through the looking glass of Trump Tower’s darkly mirrored façade is the clearest way to see its namesake.

Half a lifetime after Trump built it, the tower still defines the man. His primary residence is its triplex penthouse. His corporate offices are on the twenty-sixth floor. His national campaign headquarters are on the sixth floor, in a warren of storage and studio space formerly devoted to his reality-television show, “The Apprentice”—and still featuring, as of earlier in the campaign season, the “boardroom” table at which contestants were famously “fired.” Trump himself, after riding down an escalator through the tower’s six-story atrium, announced his candidacy from the sky-lit basement level, perched on a temporary platform rigged over the basin of a sixty-foot waterfall that—along with twenty-four hundred tons of rose-colored Italian Breccia Pernice marble—is the atrium’s signature feature.

This election season, the real building has developed an imaginary counterpart, for which it stands as a kind of credential. “I would build a great wall,” Trump said at his candidacy announcement, referring to his proposal for a concrete barrier along the United States border with Mexico. “And nobody builds walls better than me, believe me.” “I’m a builder,” he affirmed, when asked at a press event in Iowa about the logistics of the wall’s design and construction. “I know how to build.” Trump Tower was the development project that established Trump’s reputation as a builder, as a Manhattan real-estate guy independent of his father’s properties in Brooklyn and Queens—and as a man of wealth and taste. Somehow, Trump's identification with this single midtown skyscraper has long provided him with an inoculation against the consequences of subsequent flimflam and failure; somehow, it still serves as the security against which the surname is licensed; somehow, the tower substantiates its maker’s cultivated image (as surely as the dark suits and shiny cufflinks that it visually recalls) as a rich man, a businessman, a man of affairs. “It is a fact that my buildings are acclaimed and they have lasting power,” Trump wrote in a 2014 newspaper column.

How was Trump Tower built? Undertaken from 1979 to 1983, the much-litigated and not always conclusively documented story of its construction has much to divert both those who would see Trump as a visionary deal-maker or as a mendacious double-dealer. There was the low-money-down partnering with and buying-out of financiers who acquired the property’s original leasehold; there was the bottom-of-the-market acquisition of a historic teardown on the prestigious site, a stately but dowdy 1930 Bonwit Teller store next to the Tiffany & Co. flagship that anchored midtown’s luxury-retail corridor; there was the purchase of Tiffany’s “air rights,” a Manhattan zoning-law maneuver that enabled the tower to rise to fifty-eight stories, far higher than its neighbors; there was the successful lawsuit against the city to attain a multi-year tax abatement under a debatably relevant 1971 statute enacted to address housing shortages; there was the preservationist-appeasing promise to donate the teardown’s landmark Art Deco statues to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (they were subsequently jackhammered into rubble); there was the reported around-the-clock use of a “Polish brigade” of undocumented immigrant laborers; there was the involvement, not inherently untoward but certainly adding local color, of a concrete subcontracting company controlled by Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno. In a very specific cross-section of nineteen-eighties celebrity, the mixed-use commercial and condominium building’s eventual residents included Bruce Willis, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Paul Anka, Johnny Carson, and Michael Jackson, during his brief marriage to Lisa Marie Presley. Trump’s own penthouse quarters, originally decorated with a kind of haute “Miami Vice” elegance by the celebrity interior designer Angelo Donghia, have since acquired a rococo of neoclassical pilasters, ceiling murals, and gilded chairs.

What does Trump Tower look like? Its designer was Der Scutt, a capable journeyman modernist who had worked for the mid-century design luminaries Philip Johnson, Edward Durell Stone, and Paul Rudolph. An irresistible anecdote (reported in a 1990 Vanity Fair profile) has Trump saying to Scutt, ahead of a 1980 press conference, “Give them the old Trump bullshit. Tell them it is going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories,” and Scutt replying, “I don’t lie, Donald.” Scutt set the template for Trump Tower with his 1979 design for Trump’s renovation of the historic but run-down Commodore Hotel—like Grand Central Terminal next door, the work of the Beaux-Arts master builders Warren and Wetmore—into a Hyatt Grand Regency. Trump and Scutt sealed the original stone façade behind a shiny layer of mirrored glass, making walls seem like windows and making the old building seem new. Inside, Scutt scooped out a panoramic horizontal atrium. Although the atrium itself has been renovated into business-travel taupe, the original had a brassy glamour maybe not so different from the era’s fashionable singles bar and restaurant Maxwell’s Plum, where architect and client first met. Trump Tower, with its glass skin and spectacular atrium, would be the same but bigger.

Trump Tower’s brand of suavity derives—like so very many skyscrapers since—from a famously swanky and tasteful office tower built twenty years earlier and two blocks to the east, on Park Avenue: the Seagram Building, designed by Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson. Time has been kind to both buildings. Their look, called International Style or Corporate Modernism, still seems pretty sharp, in the way that mid-century modern furniture always looks contemporary. Trump Tower echoes Seagram’s bronze-toned reflective glass, flat top, and monumental marble veneers. But where Mies set Seagram’s sheer wall back from a plaza, Scutt articulated his façade into a zigzag profile, which added dozens of corner windows and resolved into a terraced setback arrangement above its base, which once housed a piquant little orchard. Today, as if the building were bald, the trees are gone.

Among the motley collection of old and new buildings that line Fifth Avenue north of Rockefeller Center, Trump Tower is almost punctiliously elegant—a little like a socially ascended guest who, not quite to the manor born, arrives unimpeachably but undeniably overdressed. That sense of decorum may have accounted for some of the building’s appeal to the architectural critics of its era, who received it with a bemused admiration and just a little distaste. “A Pleasant Surprise,” went the headline of a 1983 _Times _review, by Paul Goldberger. “It has not been difficult to presume that Trump Tower, the 68-story”—note the bullshit number—“glass skyscraper . . . would be silly, pretentious and not a little vulgar,” the critic wrote. “But if overbearing publicity and overdressed guards do not a good building make, neither do they a good building deny.” Goldberger, citing the quality of materials and workmanship, saw “not only a willingness to spend money, but also a knowledge of how to spend it correctly.” “It is sheathed in a dark glass that has a reasonable air of dignity to it,” he wrote, “But it all seems a bit too nervous, almost hyperactive, especially with the strong and serene presence of Tiffany next door.” In a 1984 letter to the Times, the newspaper’s former design correspondent, Ada Louise Huxtable, conceded having called Trump Tower “a dramatically handsome structure” based on 1979 renderings, but added that, “even with all of its pricey superglitz, [the atrium] totally lacks the cosmopolitan style to which it so aggressively aspires.”