Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower is a Neoclassic skyscraper designed by Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, with Pier LeBrun and Michel LeBrun as lead architect, and built between 1905 and 1909, for a reported $6.58 million dollars, in New York, NY.

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower is also known, or has been known as, Met Life Tower, Metropolitan Life Tower, or South Building.

Its precise street address is 1 Madison Avenue, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower is a structure of significant importance both for the city of New York and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Neoclassical style. Because of that, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower was officially declared as a national landmark on January 29^th 1972, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places on June 2^nd 1978, as well as in the New York Register of Historic Places on June 13^th 1989.

In 2016 the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower was awarded with the Hospitality Design Magazine 12th Annual Design Awards - Guestrooms or Suites (Luxury/Upscale).

The tower is inspired and tries to resemble the world-famous bell tower of St. Mark's Square in Venice, and was the tallest building in the world between 1909 and 1913.

At the time of its completion in 1909 the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included the fire protection of the tower's structure, which was achieved by coating all the steel elements - columns, beams, ties and bracins - with carefully packed concrete inside a wooden formwork to eliminate any air gaps. This was considered a technological advancement in 1909, when most buildings used heavy brick structures to protect the steel.

The building has been restored 3 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1964, 2015 and 2002.

Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, with Pier LeBrun and Michel LeBrun as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower a reality:

• Purdy & Henderson in charge of Structural Engineering
• Post & McCord as the Main Contractor

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower can be categorized as a Neoclassic building.

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower uses a frame structure made of masonry and steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a limestone cladding, which was installed in the 60's replacing the original white Tuckahoe Marble cladding.