655 Madison Avenue

 office building  Add category

279-foot, 24-story early-modernist office building completed in 1950. Designed by Sylvan & Robert Bien, it is clad in a dark-blue glass curtain wall above a 2-story base lined with glass-and-metal storefront on both floors, with a dark-grey granite band across the top and at the end piers (the facades were re-clad sometime in the 1980s). There are two lobby entrances. The main entrance is actually on the south facade on 60th Street, right of center. It it set off by 2-story black granite piers and has a glass revolving door with a traditional glass door on either side, covered by a curved glass-and-metal canopy. There is another storefront section to the right, with a set of metal service doors at the east end below a tall panel of metal louvers.

The upper floors have very thin metal framing between the glass panes. There is a setback above the 10th floor on both main facades, and then cascading setbacks every two floors. The east end of the south facade also has a small setback above the 6th floor, above which this bay is clad in light-beige brick, as is the entire east facade. This eastern bay has its own cascading setbacks, each set several floors below those of the south facade's curtain wall. The front end of the east facade, above the setbacks, has short bands of windows, narrowing to single-windows at the 13th & 14th floors, where this bay is lost to the setbacks. Directly behind it is a recessed single-window size shaft with metal railings at the front of each floor, ending at the next setback. The projecting section of the east facade with lower setbacks has a few square, punched windows on its front side, and bands of four windows at the rear, narrowing towards the top.

Above the south facade's 3rd setback, the east end changes cladding from glass to brick, which continues up to the roof line where the curtain wall ends and a tall, 2-story, brick-clad mechanical penthouse rises from the east end of the roof. The storefronts on the lower two floors are occupied by Schutz shoe store, Marc Jacobs clothing store, and Apriati jewelry.