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550 Madison Avenue

Manhattan, United States

The 499th tallest building in the world

197 m · 646 ft

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 647-foot-tall (197-meter), 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

Building data from Wikidata (CC0); heights normalised. Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).

More tall buildings in United States

  1. One World Trade Center546.2 m
  2. Empire State Building457.2 m
  3. Willis Tower442.1 m
  4. 80 South Street438 m
  5. 111 West 57th Street435.3 m

Other tall buildings worldwide

  1. Burj Khalifa · Dubai829.8 m
  2. Merdeka 118 · Kuala Lumpur678.9 m
  3. Shanghai Tower · Shanghai632 m
  4. Abraj Al Bait · Mecca601 m
  5. Makkah Clock Royal Tower Hotel · Mecca601 m
  6. Ping An Finance Centre · Futian Subdistrict599 m
  7. Lotte World Tower · Songpa District555.7 m
  8. One World Trade Center · Manhattan546.2 m