Eleven Madison Park New York, New York
The imposing volume of a former banking hall now accommodates one of Manhattan’s most celebrated restaurants. Eleven Madison Park occupies this space, at the base of a tower constructed for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1932 and listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Patrons enter the restaurant through one of the building’s monumental arcades, which the AIA Guide to New York City calls “wondrous.” Once inside, diners can view the abundant trees of Madison Square Park through tall, expansive windows. Designing a restaurant for such a monumental space required balancing two conflicting objectives: exposing guests to its architectural impact yet placing them in comfortably scaled “communities” of tables. A key design decision here was to raise the floor level in the far portion of the room a few steps, thus creating two areas with more hospitable dimensions, but with a consistency of details and furnishings that avoids identifying either area as the favored place to dine. The ornamented surfaces and hanging lanterns of the old bank have been scrupulously preserved. In order to provide appropriate lighting for evening dining, a series of hoops, with adjustable lamps, were suspended from the old lantern chains. After the restaurant had been opened for five years, when tax incentives for the room’s preservation expired, they were replaced by a less visible system of downlights. Notwithstanding the great room’s impressive wall and ceiling ornament, the floors before the restaurant conversion were simply bare concrete. The architects designed new terrazzo flooring with angular patterns in muted colors that recall the angular forms of the tower above. The wood surfaces of the restaurant’s cabinetwork and low partitions are ornamented with discrete geometrical patterns and images of the leaves of the ginkgo, linden, and sycamore trees in the centuries-old Madison Square Park outside. The bar area in an adjoining low-ceiling area provides an intimate counterpoint to the lofty main dining room. Its totally new architectural treatment features a gold-leafed ceiling, with angular facets that refer to decorative motifs on the building’s exterior. Deep-colored wood surfaces and elements such as traditional wall mirrors suggest the atmosphere of a brasserie. The mezzanine above the bar houses a private dining room that offers views across the main space to the park beyond.
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