Design Reserach Project
Page 5
Public Contribution in High-Rise Building Design
@ New York City
Sony Building
was completed in 1984 for its original owner, the AT&T telecommunications company. Work on the building started in 1978, and from the beginning this 38-storey building created heated debate both for and against. The city agreed to allow the vertical massing of the building as a zoning remission against the public amenities in the form of open-air gallery spaces, as well as AT&T's promise to retain its activities in the building well into the future.
To make this 197.5 m tall building look more monumental, Johnson topped it with the unique, curving post-modernist "chippendale" forms. Like his work on the Seagram Building for International Style, also this building was a model for a new style for others to follow.
The building is clad in grayish-pink granite from the same quarry that supplied the facade facing for Grand Central Terminal.
Picture: the enclosure public plaza of Sony Building
Structurally, the building employs tube frame in its framework, with the tubular columns tied with trusses at the top and bottom.
In accordance with Madison Avenue's identity as a shopping street, the actual building was lifted 20 m up from the street level, with only the minimalist central lobby, identified outside by the 24 m high arched bay, being actual building. From this vaulted, neo-Romanesque entrance lobby elevators take customers to the building's white marble main lobby above with 25 more elevators for reaching the upper floors. The elevators have bronze doors and their artwork was inspired by the Chrysler Building elevators.
At the street level, there were open galleries created under the building by the tall colonnades around the base and, at the backside of the building, a 20 m high galleria with a curving skylight. All these spaces have zig-zag-patterned granite mosaic floor.
Despite the abovementioned promises to the contrary, a large portion of AT&T headquarters had already been relocated to New Jersey even before the building's completion, and in 1992 the Sony Corporation bought the building as AT&T moved its activities in Manhattan to the Sixth Avenue premises in Tri Be Ca.
In a 1994 remodelling by Gwathmey Siegel, the open galleries were subsequently enclosed as Sony retail spaces and the skylighted galleria originally presented for approval and zoning remission as an open-air throughway -- was enclosed and partly used up as a retail space with caf?s as the Sony Plaza. Sony Wonder, a multimedia showcase for new products and technologies is also reachable from the plaza.
Picture: The skylight of the plaza was put together with the modern finishing of Sony Wonder Facade
Picture: Builiding top that use to be controversial issue for archtiecture critic in mid 1980s