383 Madison Avenue is an office building in New York City located on Madison Avenue between 46th and 47th Streets and owned by JP Morgan Chase. Designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, it is 755 ft (230 m) tall with 47 floors. It was completed in 2001 and opened in 2002, at which time it was, by some reports, the 88th tallest building in the world. The building has approximately 110,000 rentable square meters (1,200,000 sq ft). Formerly known as the Bear Stearns Building, it housed the world headquarters of the now defunct investment bank from the building's completion until Bear's collapse and sale to JPMorgan Chase in 2008.
The building has an octagonal tower that rises out of a rectangular base to a 20 m (70 ft) crown made of glass which is illuminated at night.
The building's visually decorative design differs from the conventional functionalist style of neighboring office buildings, and hence has proven unpopular with some critics. New York said, "This is a building you wouldn't want to get anywhere near at a cocktail party. Dressed nearly head to toe in dour granite, and geometrically proper, it's stiff to the point of pass-out boredom. Out of character with SOM's (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's) current work, the design recalls the firm's unfortunate postmodern interlude a decade ago."
A 72-story tower proposed by G Ware Travelstead for the site during the 1980s was never built. The building (also being referred as Travelstead Tower) was designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox.
The building changed hands in 2008 during JP Morgan's takeover of Bear Stearns. On their second-quarter 2008 conference call, JP Morgan estimated the building's value at $1.1–1.4 billion.
A night time photograph of the building taken at a steep angle from its base appears on the cover of William D. Cohan's book, House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street (2009).
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Note the glass "crown" at top
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—D.H. (David Herbert)