MANAHATTA and WINDTOWER

Madison House, the most recent icon in New York City’s striking skyline, was built on bedrock formed over 450 million years ago. Over millions of years, dramatic climate change and tectonic movement slowly pushed massive mountains apart, forming oceans, glaciers, and new landmasses. This pressure created the strong bedrock, Manhattan Schist, that the city is built on.  New York City’s human-built skyline follows the undulations of the natural formations and where the bedrock is highest, so are the buildings. This natural structural anchoring formed by massive winds, glaciers, heat, and pressure as well as the human vision and innovation that has created the majestic Manhattan skyline inspired artist Tom Patti. The innovative 1969 graduate of Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute has created Manhatta and Windtower, fitting for Madison House, the building in the center of where Manhattan matters.

Tom Patti’s vertical twelve-foot glass mural, Manhatta, and Windtower, the lobby’s grand kinetic metal sculpture, represent nature revealed by earth, water, atmosphere, and the primary forces of air, gravity, and temperature. Conceived to reflect the ecological relationship between humanity and the environment Manhatta echoes the geology of wind and extreme events that determined the location of Madison House in what is now named NoMad. The Lenape people, the original inhabitants of the Northeastern Woodlands that included what is now New York, called their land Manahatta, meaning “hilly land”. Named in honor of the Lenape and their connection to the earth, Patti’s Manhatta utilizes glass’s inherent transparent qualities to create an historical overlay of time as a record of geological and human events.

An integral feature of Madison House, the monumental sculpture, Windtower, is anchored in space by thin cables connecting it from ceiling to floor.  Patti has designed the piece to work with the building’s airflow system which generates a sequential, rotational movement. Its dramatic and serene kinetic presence reveals an unfolding rotary motion that can be viewed from the roadway, pedestrian street level, revolving door entryway, and the interior lobby. It is emblematic in all directions of a sense of style, beauty, and discovery - a signature statement of Madison House.

Over the past 250 million years perhaps no stretch of land in America has undergone greater transformation than Manhattan. This reveals one of the great geologic truths - no landscape is permanent. Madison House occupies a most prominent location in geological time, and along with Tom Patti’s pioneering artworks, is a declaration of our centuries’ old achievement in architecture, art, science, and engineering in partnership with our land.