AT&T Building

A 37-story postmodern skyscraper at 550 Madison Avenue in New York, designed by Philip Johnson with his partner John Burgee for AT&T as its corporate headquarters and completed in 1984. Its Chippendale-style broken pediment roofline, a deliberate historical reference on a building otherwise built of granite rather than the glass curtain walls that had defined corporate towers for decades, made it one of the most widely reproduced images of the emerging postmodern movement, celebrated by some critics as a witty break from modernist orthodoxy and dismissed by others as a superficial historicist gesture over an otherwise conventional office tower. AT&T sold the building in 1993; renamed Sony Tower after its next major tenant and later known simply by its street address, it underwent an interior and public plaza redesign completed in 2017 under a subsequent owner.