ARCHITECT ATLAS
Loading atlas
550 Madison Avenue

550 Madison Avenue

Philip Johnson & John Burgee

Photo: David Shankbone; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 13:28, 30 January 2011 (UTC) · CC BY 2.5 · Wikimedia Commons

Location
Madison Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets, Manhattan, New York, USA
Client / Owner
AT&T
Year
Completed 1984
Access
Public
Typology
Commercial

550 Madison Avenue, once the AT&T Building, stands between 55th and 56th Streets in Midtown. Philip Johnson and John Burgee designed it for AT&T. Construction began in late 1978, it topped out on November 18, 1981, and it was completed in 1984, at a cost of $200 million. The article calls the style Postmodern.

The tower is 647 feet (197 meters) tall with 37 stories and no setbacks. Its facade uses about 60,000 pieces of pink Stony Creek granite. A 116-foot entrance arch fronts Madison Avenue, and a broken pediment with a circular opening crowns the roof.

The exterior was designated a New York City landmark on July 31, 2018. Snøhetta redesigned the base for Olayan, finishing in 2023.

Comments

  • Loading comments…
Be kind. Anyone can flag a comment for review.

Sign in

or

Your profile

3 to 24 letters, numbers, underscores or periods. It’s shown with your comments.

Contact us

Questions, corrections or ideas? Your message goes straight to the Architect Atlas owner.

Save to list

    Edit information

    We look the building up on Wikipedia for you. Architect Atlas lists buildings that have their own Wikipedia article: our test for notoriety and our source of truth.

        Typology
        Style (one to three)
        Photo (shown in a 4:3 frame)

        Drag and zoom to frame the building well. New photos are checked before they appear.

        Every change is checked before it goes live: facts against Wikipedia, photos by eye.