San Diego Athletic Club Building

The San Diego Athletic Club Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed between 1924 and 1927 by William H. Wheeler, and built between 1927 and 1928, for a reported $850 thousand dollars, in San Diego, CA.

San Diego Athletic Club Building 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 San Diego Athletic Club Building is also known, or has been known as, HBJ Building, or World Trade Center San Diego Building.

Its precise street address is 1250 Sixth Avenue, San Diego, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The San Diego Athletic Club Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of San Diego 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 San Diego Athletic Club Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on April 3^rd 2013.

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 1965, 1994 and 2012.

William H. Wheeler was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

But that's not all, there was also a whole team of architects involved, which included: Ilton E. Loveless, and Frank W.Stevenson.

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 San Diego Athletic Club Building a reality:

• Jarboe Construction Company as the Main Contractor
• Katherine June Stafford as the collaborating Artist

The San Diego Athletic Club Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The San Diego Athletic Club Building was designed in 1924. These were the early days of the Art Deco movement, when the style hadn't yet reached its maturity, and there fore it is more likely to to still have traces of the Classical or Gothic Revival periods which preceded Art-Deco.

William H. Wheeler took a risk by designing a building that was ahead of its time, and which other architects sure took inspiration from as the Art Deco movement evolved.

The San Diego Athletic Club Building uses a frame structure made of concrete columns and beams.

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.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a poured-in-place concrete coating painted in a light gray tone. The decorative features like friezes, balconies, spandrels and horizontal bands are painted a darker shade.

The roof is flat with parapets topped with decorative elements.