550 Madison got a few of its spikier details sanded off but retains a lot of its Johnsonian strangeness. JDavidsonNYC writes
How do you protect the quality of weirdness? Eccentricity, like innovation, gets absorbed and normalized, or else devolves into self-caricature. Rarely does anyone or anything remain endearingly odd. And yet four decades after the wrapping came off Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s 550 Madison Avenue to reveal a pink stone menhir with a fancy hat, the tower still radiates a wry, ornery, unmistakably New York personality.
Convention, law, and economics often conspire to cleave architecture into exterior and interior domains. One firm designs the façade, a specialist maps the layouts, and a third ornaments the lobby. Those divisions can be as arbitrary as giving one baker responsibility for the crust and another oversight of the crumb. Johnson saw his building as a whole loaf. The porthole window in the archway matched the circular opening in the crown.
On the seventh floor, in what used to be called the sky lobby and is now the club level—but still serves as an elevator junction—the Rockwell Group has made a virtue of the darkness that Snøhetta hoped to dilute. There are a few more windows now, but even so, bronzed steel, wood paneling, mood lighting, and a fireplace in a freestanding pod all give the common areas a cocoon-like warmth.
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