271 Madison Avenue

 office building  Add category

226-foot, 22-story Renaissance-revival office building completed in 1926. Designed by Buchman & Kahn, it is clad in buff-colored brick above a 2-story limestone base. The front facade is organized into a wide center bay of five windows, and end bays with paired windows. At the ground floor there are entrances is both end bays, framed in brown marble. The main entrance is in the north bay, and the entrance to the tall plate-glass storefront in the center is in the south bay. There is also a water table of polished red granite. The 2nd floor has marble medallions between the bays.

The upper floors have uninterrupted piers framing each bay, with a pair of narrow string courses running between the 8th & 9th floors, and also above the 9th floor, where the middle bay sets back; the setback is marked by pairs of small openings separated by diminutive columns above each window, with a stone coping that follows the back-and-fort progression of the piers and recessed spaces. The end bays extend up to the 11th floor before setting back; here the setbacks are marked by blind arcades of round-arches. There are additional setbacks every two floors up to the 19th floor, above which there is a 1-story setbacks to the main roof line; the inner side walls creating by the end-bays are angled back to the further recessed middle bay. Each of the middle and end-bay setbacks are marked by the same ornament as below. The center bay has shallow-sloped metal roof at the main roof line, there are smaller penthouse levels rising above this toward the north part of the tower.

The south elevation is clad in the same brick, with ten windows per floor, up to the 13th floor, where the setbacks begin to cut into the window bays. The 21st floor has six smaller windows. At the rear of this facade, a metal chimney pipe runs up the corner and extends just above the roof line. The rear, east-facing facade has two bays of single-windows on the south end, three bays of double-windows in the recessed middle portion, and abuts the taller, neighboring building at the north end. There are two windows on each floor of the inner-facing side walls created by the recessed area. Both the west and south facades are dotted with protruding air-conditioning units.