AT&T Building (550 Madison Avenue)

AT&T Building (550 Madison Avenue), New York
David Shankbone; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 13:28, 30 January 2011 (UTC), CC BY 2.5

Philip Johnson’s skyscraper is clad in pink granite and crowned by a broken pediment like that of a Chippendale highboy. When the model was shown in 1978 it became a symbol of postmodernism: the tower was no longer to be an anonymous glass box but to have a top, middle and base like a classical column.

Philip Johnson had himself been one of the champions of modernism: he co-wrote the book on the International Style in 1932 and worked with Mies on the Seagram Building. With the AT&T Building he turned against the modernism he had helped to create. The telecommunications company AT&T wanted a headquarters with an identity, and Johnson gave it a silhouette that could be recognised from afar.

The building was completed in 1984 and met with both delight and derision. Critics saw the irony and historical quotations as mere surface, others as a liberation from post-war uniformity. Johnson had received the Pritzker Prize in 1979, as its first laureate. Later owners have remodelled the ground floor, and the building was designated a landmark in 2018. It is one of the clearest examples of how postmodernism brought ornament, colour and history back into architecture.