Tenney Building

The Tenney Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1928 by Law, Law & Potter, and built between 1929 and 1930, for a reported $1.20 million dollars, in Madison, WI.

Tenney Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Tenny Plaza.

Its precise street address is 110 E. Main Street, Madison, WI. You can also find it on the map here.

The Tenney Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Madison and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Tenney Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on October 26^th 2017.

The building underwent a major restoration in 1985.

Law, Law & Potter 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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Charles H. Tenney as the Main Developer.

The Tenney Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Tenney Building was completed in 1930, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Tenney Building uses a frame structure made of 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 90cm gray granite base before continuing the limestone facade. Horizontal lines of green terracotta frame the central windows.

Other materials found at the Tenney Building include, black marble, found on the floors and walls of the main lobby, bronce, used for the lighting fixtures and elevator doors, and plaster, which was used for the arched ceiling of the lobby and on the wide cornice that crowns it.