Sony Wonder Technology Lab

550 Madison Avenue (also 550 Madison; formerly known as the Sony Tower, Sony Plaza, and AT&T Building) is a postmodern–style skyscraper on Madison Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, New York, U.S. Designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee with associate architect Simmons Architects, the building is a , 37-story office tower with a facade made of pink granite. It was completed in 1984 as the headquarters of AT&T Corp. and later became the American headquarters of Sony. A four-story granite annex to the west was demolished and replaced with a shorter annex in the early 2020s.

A large entrance arch at the base of the building faces east toward Madison Avenue, flanked by arcades with smaller flat arches. A pedestrian atrium, running through the middle of the city block between 55th and 56th Streets, was also included in the design; a plaza was built in its place in the 2020s. The presence of the atrium enabled the building to rise higher without the use of setbacks because of a provision in the city's zoning codes. The ground-level lobby is surrounded by retail spaces, originally a public arcade. The office stories are accessed from a sky lobby above the base. There is a broken pediment with a circular opening atop the building. Opinion of 550 Madison Avenue has been mixed ever since its design was first announced in March 1978.

The AT&T Building at 550 Madison Avenue was intended to replace 195 Broadway, the company's previous headquarters in Lower Manhattan. Following the breakup of the Bell System in 1982, near the building's completion, AT&T spun off its subsidiary companies. As a result, AT&T never occupied the entire building as it had originally intended. Sony leased the building in 1991, substantially renovated the base and interior, and acquired the structure from AT&T in 2002. Sony sold the building to the Chetrit Group in 2013 and leased back its offices there for three years. The Olayan Group purchased 550 Madison Avenue in 2016 with plans to renovate it, and the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building's exterior as a landmark in 2018. Olayan redeveloped the building in the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Site

550 Madison Avenue is in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. The rectangular land lot is bounded by Madison Avenue to the east, 56th Street to the north, and 55th Street to the south. The lot covers approximately , with a frontage of on Madison Avenue and on both 55th and 56th Streets. The building is on the same city block as the Corning Glass Building to the west. Other nearby buildings include St. Regis New York and 689 Fifth Avenue to the southwest, the Minnie E. Young House to the south, the New York Friars Club and Park Avenue Tower to the east, 432 Park Avenue to the northeast, 590 Madison Avenue to the north, and Trump Tower and the Tiffany & Co. flagship store to the northwest.

The site was occupied by a stream before being developed in the 1800s. The AT&T Building directly replaced fifteen smaller structures, including several four- and five-story residences dating from the late 19th century, which were converted into commercial stores in the mid-20th century. This stretch of Madison Avenue in Midtown was a prominent retail corridor during the 20th century, but new office buildings were developed on the avenue in the two decades after World War II ended. The site at 550 Madison Avenue was described by ''New York'' magazine as "unusually human" compared to Midtown's other office developments due to the neighborhood's relatively low height.

Architecture

550 Madison Avenue was designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee of Johnson/Burgee Architects. Johnson had been an influential figure in modernist architecture during the late 20th century, having helped design the Seagram Building nearby in the 1950s, but he reverted to more classical motifs for 550 Madison Avenue's design. The building was among Johnson and Burgee's most influential works and, according to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), is sometimes described as the world's first postmodern–style skyscraper. Alan Ritchie of Johnson/Burgee was named as design manager, while Simmons Architects was the associate architect.

Engineers and contractors involved in the building's construction included structural engineer Leslie E. Robertson of Robertson & Fowler Associates; associate engineer Leroy Callender; foundation engineer Mueser, Rutledge, Johnston & DeSimone; mechanical engineer Cosentini Associates; and interior designer ISD Inc. Frank Briscoe was the construction manager, while William Crow Construction and HRH Construction were the general contractors. 550 Madison Avenue's developer, telecommunications firm AT&T Corp., had requested that the building use material obtained exclusively from the United States.

Form

The primary portion of the building is the 37-story office tower along Madison Avenue, on the eastern section of the land lot. The tower is tall, as measured from sidewalk level to the highest point of the tower's broken pediment. There are no setbacks. Unlike other postmodernist structures with irregular ground-level plans, 550 Madison Avenue was designed as a rectangle at ground level, similar to older International Style buildings. The tower stories have a footprint measuring .

There was also a three- and four-story annex at the western end of the site. At the time of 550 Madison Avenue's construction, there was a lease on the adjacent Corning Glass Building that limited the height of any structures near that building to in height. This restriction included the westernmost lots of the AT&T site, so the roof of the annex was exactly 60 feet tall. Following an early-2020s renovation, the annex was demolished and replaced with a single-story annex.

Facade

550 Madison's articulation is inspired by that of classical buildings, with three horizontal sections similar to the components of a column: a base, shaft, and capital. The facade is clad with 60,000 pieces of roughly textured pink Stony Creek granite, weighing up to each, supplied by Castellucci & Sons from its Connecticut quarry. More than of granite is used, representing over of the material. The stonework cost $25 million in total and required an additional of steel to support it. Varying reasons are given for the use of granite. Johnson considered pink granite as "simply the best" type of stone, and Ritchie said the Stony Creek pink granite had "more character" than granite from other sources. Burgee said the pink color was chosen to contrast with 590 Madison Avenue, the gray-green granite structure built simultaneously by IBM to the north.

The granite facade helped to reduce energy consumption compared to the glass curtain walls used on many of the city's contemporary skyscrapers. , during the building's renovation, it received an "A" grade on a citywide energy-efficiency ranking system. About one-third of the facade is clad in glass. When the plans were announced in 1978, Johnson claimed that the glass on the facade would make 550 Madison Avenue the city's "most energy-efficient structure". The windows are recessed into granite surrounds that are up to deep. The architects had wanted deeper windows, but the high cost of the granite made this infeasible. Additionally, the round mullions of the original design were given a more rectangular shape, and the window arrangement was dictated by the interior use. The building also includes more than 1,000 pieces of brass manufactured by the Chicago Extruded Metals Company.

Base

The main entrance is on Madison Avenue and consists of an archway measuring high by wide, with a recess deep. Within the archway is a arched window, topped by a circular oculus with a radius. Both windows have glazed glass panels and vertical and horizontal bronze mullions. These windows are surrounded by stonework with rhombus tiles. The side walls of the arch have smaller round arches and rectangular stonework, while the top of the arch contains recessed rectangular lights. According to architectural writer Paul Goldberger, the arch may have been influenced by the Basilica of Sant'Andrea, Mantua. AT&T said the arch was supposed to make the building appear dominant and give it "a sense of dignity". To the left and right of the main entrance arch are three flat-arched openings, measuring tall by wide, with voussoirs at their tops.

Originally, 550 Madison Avenue had an open-air arcade north and south of the central archway, extending west to the public atrium behind the building. The arcade, conceived as a 100-foot-high space, was downsized to 60 feet "for reasons of scale". The presence of the arcade allowed for what Johnson described as "a more monumental building" with more floor area. There are 45 granite columns within the arcade, weighing apiece. The granite columns, which encase the building's steel frame, are designed to resemble load-bearing columns; they use thicker stone to represent solidity, and they have notches to represent depth. There was no retail space on the Madison Avenue front because, according to critic Nory Miller, "AT&T didn't want a front door sandwiched between a drug store and a lingerie shop." After the AT&T Building's opening, the arcade gained a reputation for being inhospitable, dark, and windy. Following a renovation in the 1990s, the arcade was enclosed with recessed display windows with grids of bronze mullions. When the windows were replaced in the early 2020s, transparent mullions were added.

At the extreme ends on Madison Avenue are single-story flat arches surmounted by flagpoles. These lead to recessed passages along 55th and 56th Streets, which act as an extension of the sidewalks on these streets. There are multicolored granite pavement tiles within these passages. The 55th and 56th Street elevations of the facade contain flat arches measuring tall, supported by granite-clad piers at regular intervals. Just above each flat arch is a circular opening with canted profiles, atop which are four vertically aligned rectangular openings. The circular openings were carved in false perspective, making the arcades on either side appear deeper than they actually were.

The granite wall of the original annex on 55th Street was windowless and had three garage doors. The granite wall on 56th Street had a tall window bay, a garage door, and a cornice.

Shaft

On all elevations of the facade, the intermediate stories are divided vertically into several bays, each of which has one single-pane window on each floor. The Madison Avenue (eastern) and western elevations of the facade are identical to each other, as are the 55th and 56th Street elevations. The west and east facades are divided into nine bays each. The center bay is eight windows wide, with three sets of four windows on either side, as well as a wide single window at the extreme north and south ends. Granite spandrel panels separate the windows on different stories, except at the executive offices in the top three stories, which contained bays with glazed curtain walls. The north and south facades are divided into six bays each, separated by granite piers. There are joints, or gaps, where the panels meet. The panels are further divided by shallower false joints, which resemble the real joints.

The granite panels are typically thick, while the mullions are square. The granite panels are extremely heavy, with many panels weighing over , so they could not be hung onto the steel frame as with typical skyscrapers. Leslie Robertson determined that each granite panel had to be anchored individually to the steel frame, and the mounting apparatus had to be strong enough to support the weight of two panels.

Pediment

At the roof is a broken pediment, consisting of a gable that faces west toward Fifth Avenue and east of the Madison Avenue. The center of the pediment features a circular opening that extends the width of the roof. The opening measures across. Within the opening are ribbed slats, which contain vents for the building's HVAC system; according to Johnson, the vents were supposed to create steam puffs when there was a certain amount of moisture in the air. The remainder of the gable is trimmed with a stone coping. The granite slabs are suspended from a steel parapet.

The pediment, inspired by classical designs, was included to unify the symmetrical facades. Johnson may have also been inspired by his dissatisfaction with the Citigroup Center's sloped roof, visible from his own office in the Seagram Building. Johnson/Burgee wanted to make the roof recognizable upon the skyline, and they decided upon a pediment because it was well suited for the narrow tower. During the design process, Johnson/Burgee had considered various ornamental designs before deciding on the circular notch. One of the previous buildings on the site, the Delman Building at 558 Madison Avenue, had a similar broken pediment, although Johnson denied claims it influenced 550 Madison Avenue's rooftop. Instead, Johnson claimed to have been inspired by Al-Khazneh in the Jordanian city of Petra.

Features

550 Madison Avenue has a gross floor area of . The superstructure is composed of steel tubes, except at the base, where shear walls connect the sky lobby and foundation. The steel beams were constructed by Bethlehem Steel. The colonnade at the base was insufficient to protect against wind shearing. As a result, the core of the tower contains two concrete and steel "shear tubes", each measuring . In addition to its 37 above-ground stories, the building is designed with three basements. One of these basement levels contained a 45-spot parking garage, originally meant for AT&T board members. There were also vehicular elevators for delivery trucks.

Lobbies

The building's main lobby is just inside the large arch on Madison Avenue. The lobby measures and originally contained a floor made of black-and-white marble, as well as walls made of granite. The floor pattern was inspired by the designs of British architect Edwin Lutyens. The lobby's ceiling was a groin vault. One wall of the main lobby contained an arcade with Byzantine-inspired column capitals, behind which was an elevator lobby with bronze elevator doors. After a 2020s renovation, the lobby was redesigned with large windows at its western end, as well as decorative materials like terrazzo, leather, and bronze mesh. The terrazzo floors incorporate some of the original marble flooring. The lowest portions of the lobby wall are decorated with the mesh, while the rest of the walls are covered in white marble. ''Solid Sky'', a spherical blue sculpture by Alicja Kwade, hangs in the lobby.

''Spirit of Communication'' (also ''Golden Boy''), a bronze statue, was moved to 550 Madison Avenue's main lobby in 1983. Created by Evelyn Beatrice Longman in 1916, it had stood atop AT&T's previous headquarters at 195 Broadway until 1981. The statue depicts a 24-foot-tall (7.3 m) winged male figure on top of a globe, wrapped by cables, clutching bolts of electricity in his left hand. The statue was repainted in gold leaf when it was moved to 550 Madison Avenue. The statue was placed on a pedestal inside the lobby, with the circular window atop the main entrance arch seeming to form a halo above the statue. It was moved to AT&T's Basking Ridge, New Jersey, facility in 1992.

From the main lobby, elevators led to a sky lobby on the seventh floor, above ground level. The building's security checkpoints were originally in the sky lobby, which was clad with veined Breccia Strazzema marble but otherwise sparsely decorated. Between 1992 and 1994, after multimedia conglomerate Sony acquired the building, Dorothea Rockburne was hired to paint two abstract frescoes, and Gwathmey Siegel redesigned the lobby with wooden paneling and black glass. The frescoes, titled "Northern Sky" and "Southern Sky", measure and consist of red and yellow patterns with spheres. When the building was renovated in the 2020s, the Rockwell Group converted the sky lobby into an amenity space. The amenity spaces include a central lounge flanked by Rockburne's paintings, as well as four conference rooms, a small cafe, library, hearth room, pool room, screening room, and fitness center.

Atrium and annex

Between the annex to the west and the main tower to the east was an atrium measuring wide by tall. The public atrium between the annex and the tower was originally covered by a metal and glass roof, the ceiling of which was a half-barrel vault (shaped as a quarter-circle). The atrium directly faced that of the IBM Building at 590 Madison Avenue, and the presence of 550 Madison Avenue's atrium allowed additional floor area in the building. According to Burgee, he wanted the atrium to have a distinct identity from the office tower. The atrium, designed as an open-air pedestrian pathway, was enclosed in the 1990s when Sony moved to the building. A large television screen was installed with this renovation.

In the early 2020s, a new garden called 550 Madison Garden was constructed within the atrium. The garden contains shrubs, trees, bulbs, and perennial plants and is split into several sections. The space is open every day between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. It is covered by a metal-and-glass canopy, which collects of rainwater every year. The garden's greenery extends onto the roof of the rebuilt annex to the west. The atrium also includes a waterfall, seating areas, and circular floor pavers that demarcate various parts of the space. The design details include poetry inscribed on the pavers, as well as a "steam pit" that is heated during the winter.

The parking garage and truck elevators were in the annex, with a ramp to the garage from 56th Street and the elevators from 55th Street. The annex had its own lobby near 56th Street. There was also retail space within the original annex, facing the western wall of the atrium. Infoquest, an AT&T technology exhibit, was initially housed in the annex; it opened in 1986 and operated until about 1993. The annex became the Sony Wonder Technology Lab museum in 1994; it was open on Tuesdays through Saturdays, and Sony described the free exhibits as a "technology and entertainment museum for all ages".

Office spaces

The fifth through thirty-third stories have offices. 550 Madison Avenue's height is equivalent to that of a 60-story building with ceilings, but the building has higher ceilings and thus fewer stories. At 550 Madison Avenue, ceilings were typically high, and executive suites had ceilings of . At the time, computer hardware required taller ceilings than was usual. As originally designed, the acoustic ceiling panels had air conditioning vents and minimal ceiling lighting, as each worker's desk had task lighting. In addition to offices, the building included a two-story auditorium at the fifth and sixth stories, as well as a CCTV studio at the eighth story.

The office stories were generally less ornately decorated than the lobbies, but the executive offices on the thirty-third and thirty-fourth floors had elaborate wood paneling. AT&T had requested that the highest-quality materials be used, although escalating costs during construction led to the substitution of cheaper material in some places. The acoustic ceilings were manufactured by the Industrial Acoustics Company, which fabricated of perforated steel panels clad with vinyl. In addition, AT&T bought $5.5 million worth of honey-colored Burmese teak furnishings such as paneling, trim, and doors from L. Vaughn Company, which hired 75 workers to supply the rare wood. The decorative materials used in the building included Burmese teak document cabinets, Turkish onyx elevator panels, Chinese silk in the employee dining room, and Italian leather in the executive dining room. Italian marble was used for the executive staircases.

After Sony moved into the building in 1992, Gwathmey Siegel renovated the interior with additional staircases, as well as doors topped with glass panels. The offices were refitted with sound systems and Sony videocassette recorder systems. The spaces were generally more flexible than under AT&T's occupancy, as they were meant to accommodate record and movie production. A conference center for Sony was also installed on the twenty-eighth floor. The AT&T executive offices on the thirty-fifth floor were retained, and an executives' dining club called the Sony Club was opened within the space.

History

AT&T was established in 1885 and had been headquartered at 195 Broadway in Lower Manhattan since 1916. In the subsequent decades, AT&T became the world's largest telephone company, and maintenance costs on its headquarters increased. With its continued growth, AT&T acquired land for a new facility in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, in 1970, although the company denied that it was fleeing to the suburbs. John D. deButts, who became AT&T's CEO in 1972, also wished to construct a new Midtown headquarters as a monument to the company and to boost his own name recognition. The 195 Broadway headquarters had a capacity of only 2,000 workers, but AT&T had 5,800 headquarters workers by the mid-1970s, most of them in New Jersey.

Development

Site acquisition

AT&T began looking for a Midtown site in the early 1970s, hiring James D. Landauer Associates to assist with site selection. It wished to build a site near Grand Central Terminal but eschewed Park Avenue as being too prominent. The western blockfront of Madison Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets was being acquired by IBM, which refused to give up its lot to AT&T. On the block immediately to the south, Stanley Stahl

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