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

Madison, Wisconsin Madison is the county seat of Dane County, Wisconsin, Dane County and the capital city of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. As of the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census the population was 269,840, making it the second-largest city in Wisconsin b ...

. 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 United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artist ...

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 Office of the Governor. Completed in 1917, the building is the fifth to serve as the W ...

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

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unit ...

building has a

limestone Limestone ( calcium carbonate ) is a type of carbonate sedimentary rock which is the main source of the material lime. It is composed mostly of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of . Limestone forms wh ...

exterior with a

granite Granite () is a coarse-grained ( phaneritic) 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 cools and solidifies und ...

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, terra cotta, or terra-cotta (; ; ), in its material sense as an earthenware substrate, is a clay-based unglazed or glazed ceramic where the fired body is porous. In applied art, craft, construction, and architecture, terracot ...

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 fill ...

between the five inner windows. Fluted

pilaster In classical architecture, a pilaster is an architectural element used to give the appearance of a supporting column and to articulate an extent of wall, with only an ornamental function. It consists of a flat surface raised from the main wal ...

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 extension of the 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/breast'). ...

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

marble Marble is a metamorphic rock composed of recrystallized carbonate minerals, most commonly calcite or dolomite. Marble is typically not foliated (layered), although there are exceptions. In geology, the term ''marble'' refers to metamorpho ...

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 drew its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century Italia ...

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 Law, Law & Potter was an architecture firm in Madison, Wisconsin; Potter Lawson, Inc. is its modern-day successor. Some of its buildings are listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places for their architecture. The firm was Madison's l ...

, 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 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