AT and T BUILDING

Designed by Philip Johnson; completed 1984 New York, New York
As arguably the first Postmodern building designed on a monumental, commercial
scale, the AT&T Building (completed in 1984 by Philip Johnson) generated sufficient
popular interest to be front-page news in the New York Times on 31 March 1978 and the cover story in Time
on 8 January 1979, which portrayed the architect Philip Johnson cradling a model of the
proposed design. In legitimizing Postmodern style and ideas, it reversed almost three
decades of modern principles espoused by Mies van der Rohe that Johnson himself had
practiced with the master in the Seagram Building (1958). Gone are the open plaza (the
externalization of universal space); the understated, monochromatic, almost mute metaland-
glass curtain wall; and the nonconformist, neo-Baroque setback from the avenue.
Instead, Johnson’s building presses directly against the site line along the entire block of
Madison Avenue between East 55th and East 56th Streets and introduces a newer type of
urban amenity: a glass-canopied atrium with retail establishments. Several similarities to
the Seagram Building remain, however, in the deeply recessed ground-story lobbies,
overall floor plans, and steel construction. In fact, the plan is typical of postwar high-rise
office buildings, comprising a sizable service core of elevators, emergency stairwells, and
rest rooms, with resultant narrow office spaces.
Discussions for the design began in the mid-1970s with AT&T, ironically one of the
world’s largest corporations before its divestiture only shortly after the erection of the
building. At a cost of $200 million, the 648-foot-high, 37-story building dedicated ten of
its stories to its eponymous corporation, with the remaining rented as general office
floors.
Its two central Postmodern features are the selection of a masonry enclosure, a light
pink granite, and the addition of a crowning broken pediment. The latter feature fueled
the nickname the “Chippendale” skyscraper, presumably because of its association with
Thomas Chippendale’s highboy chest-on-chests rather than with its actual but much rarer
architectural source in 18th-century Georgian entrances. Because of the density of the
location, the pedestrian experiences the building at two scales: from the street, the
ground-level arcades, and from a considerable distance, the signature broken pediment.
Originally, the ground level of the tower comprised open arcades around
the small entrance lobby and service core. The unenclosed public space
beneath the tower, compared to an Egyptian hypostyle hall by one
historian, was intended to mitigate the intensive use of the site and to
repay the absence of setbacks in the tower. At the rear of the site, a glasscanopied
galleria in the spirit of Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele
(1867) contains a three-story row of shops.

AT&T Building showing Chippendale detail, designed by
Phillip Johnson and John Burgee (1984)
A quarter of a barrel vault, the
canopy is supported by quarter-round arches, not unlike the Romanesque tunnel-vaulted nave of St.-Sernin (1100) in Toulouse, France.
Concentric diamond and chevron patterns animate the granite floors. In 1994 Gwathmey
Siegel and Associates, in an effort to respond to criticism of insufficiently sheltered
public spaces, enclosed both the public arcades beneath the tower and the galleria, which
was extended into one bay on either side of the elevator core. By creating deep shadows,
Gwathmey Siegel’s bay windows for storefronts retain the feeling of depth in the arcade
openings.
The most tactile experience occurs at the street level, where the flame-finished pale
pink Stony Creek granite cladding meets the ground. Above substantial square column
bases rise piers with reentrant corners, and quarter pyramids mark this articulation.
Johnson has claimed that the entrance composition, with its central arch flanked by
narrower trabeated openings, recalled Filippo Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel (1429) at
Santa Croce, Florence, although critics did not hold both in equal esteem. Following the
rhythm of openings established at the ground level, uninterrupted vertical bays contain
granite mullions between piers, anchored underneath to steel tubes and originally
intended to be round sectioned. Cost containment prevented the materialization of this
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feature, and in combination with the insufficient suppression of windows into the wall,
AT&T’s resultant thinness has been a frequent source of criticism, which compared the
building unfavorably with Louis Sullivan’s Wainwright Building (1891) in St. Louis,
Missouri, admired for the expressive qualities of its brick masonry and molded terracotta.
More successful, however, are the upper-level executive floors, where deeper
suppression of the glazing and round-sectioned mullions were realized. Also lamented
were the bare expanses of granite between the entrance arcade and the office floors as
well as between the upper-level executive office floors and the sloping edges of the
pediment, the subtle cornice of which, however, was praised.
At the main entrance, a suppressed glazed entrance arch, with an oculus
above, echoes the narrow 116-foot central arch. Lavish detailing of the
material includes a diamond pattern, or opus reticulatum, in the apron around the openings
and fully threedimensional articulated moldings around the arch and in
corners. Capped with a gilded cross vault that springs from corner
brackets, the compact but well-proportioned 65-foot-tall lobby has a
black-and-white marble floor pattern recalling Durbar Hall (1931) at the
Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, India, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens.
Lined with granite walls as well, the lobby precedes a barrel-vaulted
elevator hall; columns with abstracted Byzantine capitals demarcate the
two spaces. Among the renovations supervised by Gwathmey Siegel and
Associates, black glass replaced the diamond-patterned granite in the blind
lobby arches. Bronze elevator doors, set in a blind arcade, repeat the
arched forms. The regilded sculpture Genius of Electricity (1916), by Evelyn Beatrice
Longman, known popularly as Golden Boy, from the top of the earlier headquarters,
was replaced, after the Sony Corporation purchased the building, by an
untitled nonobjective Joel Shapiro (1941-) sculpture.
Called the “sky lobby,” the main reception area sits one level above ground behind the
entrance oculus. Its veined Breccia Strazzema marble forms a central aedicule enclosed
by halfround arches springing from linteled openings. Gwathmey Siegel and Associates
softened surfaces with wood panels, black glass, and murals. In the middle section of the
building, there are 27 standard office floors, with ten-foot heights, and the executive
offices occupy the 33rd and 34th floors. In them, Johnson specified molded wood panels
and a double grand staircase connecting the two levels. Ventilation is diffused between
vinyl-clad metal acoustical ceiling panels, and task lighting illuminates each workstation.
Considered flamboyant and arbitrary by some, frivolous and stylistically promiscuous
by others, the building design generated ample criticism. Its historical references, reduced
to two dimensions, were said to lack symbolic weight. Still, in its superficial use of the
grammar of architecture, the AT&T Building expresses a perhaps unconscious camp
quality, and as an object of the resentment of Postmodernism for its esoteric references
and ad hoc assembly of historical images, AT&T represents at the same time the
overthrow of orthodox modernism.

Erik Gunnar Asplund

Architect, Sweden
Erik Gunnar Asplund was among the most important Scandinavian architects of the
first half of the 20th century. His early work evolved from National Romanticism through
the sparse Nordic classicism of the World War I period and by 1930 embraced canonic
modernism. At the time of his death in 1940, his work assumed a personal direction,
influenced more by traditional architecture and a desire for symbolic content than by
contemporaneous design tenets. Asplund had a unique ability to create a sense of place in
his architecture, to manifest directly the context in which his works were situated through
manipulating landscape elements as forcefully as architectural ones. His untimely death
at age 55 occurred at the height of his creative powers and productivity.
Born in Stockholm, Asplund studied architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology.
After traveling to Germany on an Institute Scholarship, he returned to Stockholm and
helped establish, with some fellow students, the Klara School, an independent academy
of design. Supplanting the more normative neoclassical training of the period, the Klara
School, under the tutelage of Carl Bergsten, Ragnar Ösberg, Ivar Tengbom, and Carl
Westman, proposed a Romantic sensibility incorporating the influence of Scandinavian
vernacular design and handicrafts. The inclusion of vernacular and traditional sources of
expression had influenced Nordic architecture since the turn of the century, creating a
style known as National Romanticism. The National Romantic influences of Westman
and Ösberg, and especially Ösberg’s ability to combine symmetrical facade composition
with informal plan organization, informed Asplund’s early work: examples include the
villa project for Ivar Asplund (1911), the Karlshamn School competition entry (1912),
and the Villa Ruth (1914). These works are characterized by a vernacular imagery created
through using traditional board and batten siding, tilecovered gable-roof forms, and
carefully placed and proportioned window openings.
Asplund, while continuing to use vernacular imagery, began to use
classical motifs in his work, as witnessed in the first-place competition
entry for the Woodland Cemetery (1915, Stockholm; in collaboration with
Sigurd Lewerentz) and his Woodland Chapel (1919, Stockholm), which
blends Romanticism and Classicism. The simple, steeply pitched chapel
roof recalls Swedish vernacular buildings, whereas the austere Doric
portico, domed interior space, and white-rendered stucco walls reference
classicism. The Villa Snellman (1918), located in Djursholm, a Stockholm
suburb, continues Asplund’s dialogue between classicism and
Romanticism, as does the Lister County Courthouse (1921, Sölvesborg).
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In the Courthouse, however, the detail qualities of the building become
somewhat idiosyncratic, even exaggerated, in execution.

Woodland Chapel, Stockholm, Sweden, designed by Erik Gunnar
Asplund (1919)
Three
competition entries for urban projects entered during the period 1917–
22—the Göta Square (1917) and the Gustaf Adolf Square (1918), both in
Göteborg, and the Royal Chancellery (1922) in Stockholm—indicate that Asplund’s sensitivity in designing buildings within the historical context of the city is
equal to that within the natural landscape.
Paralleling the development of classicism in Scandinavia during the 1920s, the
classical-Romantic duality of Asplund’s earlier work gave way to a more explicit
expression of classical principles. The work of this period represents a serious attempt at
innovation within the context of classicism rather than a nascent eclecticism. Two
buildings in Stockholm, the Skandia Cinema (1923) and the Public Library (1928),
demonstrated his leadership position in this pan-Nordic movement. Whereas the Skandia
Cinema projects a certain playful and idiosyncratic use of classical elements, motifs, and
images, the Public Library has a simplicity and austerity reminiscent of the neoclassical
architecture of the French Enlightenment. Although the initial design for the library was
explicitly classical, with coffered dome, columnar entry porticos, and palazzo-like facade
treatment, the built work, while maintaining the organizational parti, was abstracted into two
simple volumetric elements: cube and cylinder. Preceded by a large reflecting pool, the
building sits slightly rotated in its parklike setting, further enhancing the monumentality
of the austere volumes. The cylinder houses a great rotunda, which contains the tiered,
open-stack lending hall. It is a monumental clerestoried space that recalls the work of the
French 18th-century architect Etienne-Louis Boullée. Exterior and interior surfaces are
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 148
rendered in stucco, with finely proportioned openings and excellently crafted and
integrated sculptural detail that provide the building with a subtle power.
The Stockholm Public Library marks the end of Nordic classicism, for
“functionalism,” as modernism was termed in Scandinavia, had appeared in Sweden.
Asplund’s 1930 Stockholm Exhibition celebrated the emergence of functionalism in
Sweden and represented a fundamental change in sensibility for the architect. The design
for the Exhibition complex underwent three phases, the last occurring after Asplund
traveled to the Continent to visit extant examples of the new “modern” architecture. The
Stockholm Exhibition not only epitomized the mechanistic aesthetics of modernism but
also served as a propaganda instrument for illustrating its social programs. However,
unlike many modernist compositions that were isolated objects sitting in green, parklike
settings, Asplund’s complex assumed a more dense, urban configuration. The light,
machinelike pavilions were tied together by such traditional urban elements as squares,
concourses, cul-de-sacs, and garden courtyards. Here, space was as important as form.
The tall, constructivist-inspired advertising mast was a light, steel structure that held
signs and flags and provided a festive and energetic quality to the Exhibition.
Although Asplund’s Bredenberg Department Store (1935, Stockholm) was
a functionalist work, the State Bacteriological Laboratories (1937, Stockholm) signaled a move away from the canons of modernism. In
his last two major commissions, the Göteborg Law Courts Annex (won in competition in
1913, redesigned in 1925, and completed in 1936) and the Woodland Crematorium
(1940), Asplund’s reaction to functionalism solidified. The addition to the Law Courts,
which were designed by Nicodemus Tessin in 1672, was initially conceived of as a direct
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extension of the original facade. In the final design, Asplund attempted the difficult
proposition of developing a facade that would create a contrasting yet harmonizing
tension between the old and the new. The result extends the rhythm of the original facade
with a modern vocabulary while containing classical inferences. The central interior
atrium, composed of a delicate concrete framework and staircases and superbly detailed
wood paneling, has a timeless quality that transcends stylistic preferences.
Asplund’s final major work, the Woodland Crematorium, is a composition dominated
by the manipulation of the naturalistic qualities of the landscape, making the buildings
seem secondary on approach. Yet the positioning of the primary architectural elements of
loggia, wall, and cross actively gathers the surrounding landscape into a dynamic,
emotional experience. The complex contains references to traditional, classical, and
modern architecture: the planar quality of the buildings stems from modernism and the
loggia and impluvium from classical sources, whereas the material usage and landscape design root
the building to its Nordic context. The integration that Asplund achieved in the complex
through the synthesis of modern with classical and vernacular precedents makes the
Woodland Crematorium, in the final analysis, one of the truly compelling buildings of the
20th century.