The Tenney Building is a historic office building at 110 E. Main Street in

Madison, Wisconsin Madison is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. It is the List of municipalities in Wisconsin by population, second-most populous city in the state, with a population of 269,840 at the 2020 Uni ...

. It was built in 1929-30 and is listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

Description

The ten-story building is located directly across from the

Wisconsin State Capitol The Wisconsin State Capitol, located in Madison, Wisconsin, houses both chambers of the Wisconsin Legislature along with the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the Governor of Wisconsin, Office of the Governor. Completed in 1917, the building is the ...

. The first floor houses commercial space, while the top nine stories serve as offices. The

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French (), is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design that first Art Deco in Paris, appeared in Paris in the 1910s just before World War I and flourished in the United States and Europe during the 1920 ...

building has a

limestone Limestone is a type of carbonate rock, carbonate sedimentary rock which is the main source of the material Lime (material), lime. It is composed mostly of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different Polymorphism (materials science) ...

exterior with a

granite Granite ( ) is a coarse-grained (phanerite, phaneritic) intrusive rock, intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly coo ...

base. Each of the upper floors features a row of seven windows on the southwest facade; the rows are divided by green

terra cotta Terracotta, also known as terra cotta or terra-cotta (; ; ), is a clay-based Vitrification#Ceramics, non-vitreous ceramicOED, "Terracotta""Terracotta" MFA Boston, "Cameo" database fired at relatively low temperatures. It is therefore a term used ...

spandrels A spandrel is a roughly triangular space, usually found in pairs, between the top of an arch and a rectangular frame, between the tops of two adjacent arches, or one of the four spaces between a circle within a square. They are frequently fil ...

between the five inner windows. Fluted

pilaster In architecture, a pilaster is both a load-bearing section of thickened wall or column integrated into a wall, and a purely decorative element in classical architecture which gives the appearance of a supporting column and articulates an ext ...

s separate the inner windows, and each is capped by a bronze light fixture. The building is topped by a limestone

parapet A parapet is a barrier that is an upward extension of a wall at the edge of a roof, terrace, balcony, walkway or other structure. The word comes ultimately from the Italian ''parapetto'' (''parare'' 'to cover/defend' and ''petto'' 'chest/brea ...

on the southwest and southeast sides. The building's lobby includes

marble Marble is a metamorphic rock consisting of carbonate minerals (most commonly calcite (CaCO3) or Dolomite (mineral), dolomite (CaMg(CO3)2) that have recrystallized under the influence of heat and pressure. It has a crystalline texture, and is ty ...

walls and floors and bronze light fixtures and elevator doors.

History

Lawyer Daniel K. Tenney built the Tenney Building's predecessor, the

Italianate The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style combined its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century It ...

style Tenney Block, on the site of the Tenney Building in 1877. His brother Henry W. Tenney and nephew Charles Kent Tenney were also Madison lawyers, and his brother Horace was a local journalist. Charles's sons Charles Homer Tenney and William D. Tenney, a lawyer and businessman respectively, announced that they would replace the Tenney Block with a larger building in 1928. Construction on the new building began in 1929 and was completed in 1930. The architecture firm of Law, Law & Potter, the largest in Madison in the 1920s and 1930s, designed the Art Deco building. While the building was initially successful and well-occupied, the impact of the

Great Depression The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade, and widespread bank and ...

led to the Tenney family losing the building to foreclosure in 1936; despite this, subsequent owners were able to profit from the building, and it remained a popular choice for Madison's professional offices into the 1960s. The building underwent a $6,000,000 renovation in 1985. The Tenney Building was added to the State and the National Register of Historic Places in 2017.

References

External links

{{commonscat-inline Office buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in Wisconsin National Register of Historic Places in Madison, Wisconsin Buildings and structures in Madison, Wisconsin Art Deco architecture in Wisconsin Commercial buildings completed in 1930