Sony Tower

The Sony Building, formerly AT & T Building is a skyscraper in New York City.

The Sony Building is 550 Madison Avenue, between 55th and 56th Street and was designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee in 1979 and completed in 1984. Originally, the building, which is clad in pink granite, built as the headquarters for AT & T and used today, however, the building is owned by Sony.

The Sony Building is considered one of the masterpieces of post-modernism. With its silhouette, it deviates as a distinctive sign of the previously customary steel and glass boxes of modernity. Johnson combines playful and ironic, a number of heterogeneous citations: The significant structure in the base area, stem and crown alludes to the buildings of the Chicago School, and in particular Louis Sullivan's postulate of a classical- tectonic structure even at high-rise buildings ( " The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered ", 1896). The lower support position cites the motif Palladio ( Serliana ), but also the facade of the Pazzi Chapel in Florence by Filippo Brunelleschi and Palladio reception at Claude- Nicolas Ledoux around 1800. Notwithstanding the granite outer skin refer proportions, three-zone structure and rear Gallery also growing at the Seagram Building in New York in 1958, at the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson had worked together. Eclecticism as a principle of art and postmodern Zitierverfahren clearly reveal the gable at the time provoked the embossed by the modernist architectural art. He remembers especially in Anglo-American culture to furniture in the style of Thomas Chippendale, especially on housing of grandfather clocks ( "grandfather 's clock" ). The New Yorker called the building so well "that with the Chippendale top".

Inside the building, visitors can visit the Wonder Technology - land, where the history of technical communication from the perspective Sony is displayed on four floors.