140 New Montgomery Building

The 140 New Montgomery Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Miller and Pflueger, and built between 1924 and 1925 in San Francisco, CA.

140 New Montgomery 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 building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• The Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company Building between 1925 and 1984.
• The Pacific Bell Building between 1984 and 2012.

Its precise street address is 140 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2012 and 2013. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Page & Turnbull Architects.

Miller and Pflueger was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Alexander Aimwell Cantin.

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 Gladding McBean Company as the Main Contractor.

The 140 New Montgomery Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The 140 New Montgomery Building was completed in 1925, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The 140 New Montgomery 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.

Other materials found at the 140 New Montgomery Building include, plaster, this material is hand painted and decorates the ceilings of the main lobby, marble, found on the lobby's walls, and bronce, used for the decorative fixtures.