Philip Johnson and John Burgee, The AT&T Building

0:00:06.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re standing on East 56th Street at Madison Avenue, looking up at a building that’s almost impossible to see in its entirety from any one point.

0:00:14.6 Dr. Matthew A. Postal: Think about it, when you’re in an airplane flying into New York, after the Empire State Building, the former AT&T building has to be one of New York’s most recognizable skyscrapers.

0:00:26.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: And that’s because of the very unusual shape at the top.

0:00:29.4 Dr. Matthew A. Postal: You mean the broken pediment?

0:00:30.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: The broken pediment was a motif that comes out of the classical tradition and was a common motif in the Renaissance, but it was always historicizing. Here we are seeing it on a scale that is completely unprecedented.

0:00:42.9 Dr. Matthew A. Postal: It reminds me of colonial-era furniture.

0:00:45.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: So that’s a kind of neoclassicism that’s referring back to classical antiquity, but by way of the Renaissance.

0:00:53.0 Dr. Matthew A. Postal: It’s a motif that never goes away.

0:00:54.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: This building is known as the AT&T building, even though it’s no longer that company’s headquarters. It was designed by Philip Johnson with John Burgee It’s one of the great examples of postmodern architecture. But in order to understand what postmodernism is, we need to spend a moment talking about what modernism is and where it was when this building was built.

0:01:15.2 Dr. Matthew A. Postal: In the 1960s and even in the early ’70s, almost every building that was constructed in New York, every tall building had a glass curtain wall, mostly with metal details.

0:01:26.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: This kind of late modernism was derived from early experiments, for example, the Lever House, which is just around the corner.

0:01:33.5 Dr. Matthew A. Postal: Originating in the late ’40s, probably had its heyday in the ’50s, and in the ’60s it began to look conventional. What had once been revolutionary, even radical, was now associated with every commercial building, every corporate tower, and it lacked the energy and excitement that it once had.

0:01:52.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: And by the 1960s, there was increasing antagonism toward the modern, its sense of being antiseptic, of being anti-human.

0:02:02.1 Dr. Matthew A. Postal: People called them glass boxes.

0:02:03.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: They felt cold. The cliche about modernism was that it removed the decorative, that it removed historical references, that it was a kind of pure form. But in the mid-1970s, this idea of postmodern begins to develop, especially in architecture. The AT&T building is not steel and glass. What I’m seeing is stone.

0:02:24.5 Dr. Matthew A. Postal: It’s a building that is decorated, ornamented, a kind of collage of historical forms.

0:02:31.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: Let’s catalog them. At the top, the broken pediment, which is an emblem of the historical.

0:02:37.8 Dr. Matthew A. Postal: At the base, you have arcades, a soaring round arched entrance, which is flanked by bays. And when you combine the central arch and the side bays, it may remind you of the Pazzi Chapel in Florence by Brunelleschi.

0:02:53.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: And the half barrel vault made of glass is perhaps a reference to the Galleria in Milan.

0:02:58.9 Dr. Matthew A. Postal: The references don’t come from one point in history, but they are shuffled together into one late 20th-century office tower.

0:03:08.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: It’s hard to overstate how radical postmodernism felt in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

0:03:14.5 Dr. Matthew A. Postal: But is it radical or is it playful?

0:03:17.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: So many of the postmodernist architects, their buildings look like playthings. They look like they’re constructed from bits and pieces the way a child takes wooden blocks and puts them together.

0:03:28.3 Dr. Matthew A. Postal: The origins of postmodernism generally lie with Robert Venturi. And Robert Venturi wrote two very important books. They both have playful titles, “Complexity and Contradiction in Modern Architecture” and “Learning from Las Vegas.” Clearly, Philip Johnson was influenced by Venturi. But what’s key here is that he was building it for AT&T, which at the time was the only phone service provider in the United States.

0:03:56.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: So this building was meant as more than simply a place to house the corporate headquarters. It was meant as a corporate emblem.

0:04:03.5 Dr. Matthew A. Postal: A symbol of this great company. The irony is that by the time that the building was completed in 1983–84, AT&T had been broken up by the U.S. Government.

0:04:15.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: The AT&T building sits between the anti-establishment 1960s and ’70s and that new conservatism that was ushered in by Reagan in the 1980s. On the one hand, it’s rejecting the sleek glass walls of so many mid-century corporate office towers with its rough-hewn stone facade and decorative forms. On the other hand, in its enormous scale and its purpose, the AT&T building is all about corporate ambition.

“550 Madison Avenue: Story of a Skyscraper,” special insert, Bell Telephone Magazine (Autumn 1978), p. 3.

Paul Goldberger, “A Major Monument of PostModernism,” The New York Times, March 1, 1978.

Matthew A. Postal, AT&T Corporate Headquarters Building Designation Report (NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission Designation List 509 LP-2600, July 31, 2018).

Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966).

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972).

Marc Wortman, “Famed Architect Philip Johnson’s Hidden Nazi Past,” Vanity Fair (2016).

Ivan Zaknic, editor, Philip Johnson/John Burgee Architecture 1979–1985 (New York: Rizzoli, 1985).

1945–80 in the United States, an introduction

1980–now in the United States, an introduction