The Sony Building of New York City is an iconic structure built with incredible poise and talent. The former AT&T Building is 647 feet high and has over 37 stories high. The high-rise skyscraper in Manhattan is situated at 550 Madison Avenue between 55th Street and 56th Street. The construction ended in 1984 and the architects that designed the beautiful masterpiece were Philip Johnson and John Burgee as his assistant. The structure had very interesting and different appeals to it. The top of the building had an oval type circle called an ornamental top, also referred to as “Chippendale”. It displayed a beautiful archway in the entrance of the building. It was at least 7 stories high. It was very unusual and first of its kind. “With these ornamental additions, the building challenged architectural modernism’s demand for stark functionalism and purely efficient design. It is therefore considered by many critics to be a prime example of postmodern architecture.” It has been concluded that the Sony Tower was at the forefront of creating history and was the first to create a type of architecture that was so profound and beautiful.
Being the first Postmodern building, it contained “ornamental pink granite neo-Georgian pediment”. All granite used was unpolished stony creek granite. The grey pink granite known as stony creek granite comes from the same quarry that provided the front of Grand Central Station, which is located a few blocks from the Sony/AT&T Building. The building is such a complex structure built inside and outside to impress any eye. The stony creek granite columns on the outside of the building let the eye go upward. When guests approach the entrance, they are introduced with decorative cuts and turnings. When viewing it from across the street, the color and richness of the granite is so evident that you can see the pink perfectly. The reason for the granite to be unpolished was to create the illusion that it is soft and comfortable. When creating the base for the AT&T Building, Johnson used the base modeled by the New York Municipal Building. The modeling could be related to famous arches or building types in European countries. Although using different references and decorations to form a new building, it “brought back the representational and historicizing architecture of New York’s skyscrapers” (Johnson 2). The old is getting mixed in with the new that is adding to the modernism of NYC but meshing some old forms to create a better structure.