275 Madison Avenue Building

History and architecture

Rising 43 stories in height and completed in 1931, 275 Madison Avenue is an outstanding Art Deco skyscraper dating from the end of New York’s 1920s and early-1930s skyscraper boom. Designed by noted architect Kenneth Franzheim, the building features a striking polished-granite base; three stories high with tall rectangular openings, it was treated by Franzheim as a “stage setting” with a compelling black-and-silver color scheme and rich abstract ornament. Rising above the base is a dramatically massed, slab-form tower that steps back repeatedly before narrowing to a nearly square plan at its upper floors. Like the nearby Daily News Building completed the year before, 275 Madison is best described as a transitional work, bridging the exuberant, “modernistic” Art Deco style and the spare, sculptural qualities of the International Style.

Franzheim’s “exclusion of obstructive ornament” was promoted as making the building’s interiors “virtually shadowless,” but it also adds to the tower’s streamlined effect and the vertical emphasis created by its alternating white-brick stripes and dark window bands. No. 275 Madison Avenue was developed by Houston Properties, a New York-based firm founded by Jesse H. Jones, who built nearly all of the skyscrapers constructed in Houston, Tex. during the first half of the twentieth century. A nationally known figure, Jones also served as Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a position in which he was “probably the most powerful financial baron in the nation.”