With Warren Platner’s luxe furnishings and Sheila Hicks’s abstract tapestries, the project was a Mad Men-era version of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a complete work of art. Ford’s executives gazed across the bougainvillea at one another and outward, onto a world awaiting their largess. The architecture, mixing private offices with the public garden, aimed to improve the daily lives of workers and to give New York a building that lent form to an Emersonian ideal.

That ideal involved civic uplift. The architecture was meant to be humane.

After half a century, the building remained a gem but needed an upgrade. City officials gave the foundation until 2019 to remove asbestos, fix the sprinklers and make the site wheelchair accessible. The foundation’s president, Darren Walker, saw the opportunity to nudge the headquarters, in other ways as well, into the 21st century.

And so Ford has now downsized its footprint, making room for other foundations. There’s a new public art gallery, a touch-and-feel garden in the atrium for the blind; and Mr. Walker converted his own office into a pair of conference rooms that can be used by outside nonprofits.

The building is rechristened the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice.