Central Heating Plant

The Central Heating Plant is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Paul Philippe Cret, and built between 1933 and 1934, for a reported $5.75 million dollars, in Washington DC, DC.

Its precise street address is 325 13th Street, Washington Dc, DC. You can also find it on the map here.

The Central Heating Plant is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Washington DC 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 Central Heating Plant was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on October 4^th 2007.

The building has been restored 4 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1958, 1973, 1990 and 2016.

Paul Philippe Cret 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: James A. Wetmore, and Louis Simon.

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 Procurement Division of the U.S. Treasury Department as the Main Developer.

The Central Heating Plant can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Central Heating Plant was designed in 1931, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Central Heating Plant 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.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features stylized brown and yellow bricks with decorative sculptural panels and tall industrial-type windows in a stepped facade that sits on a limestone base.

In order for the District of Columbia Commission of Fine Arts to accept the plans presented, Cret incorporated the stacks within the building but allowed them to rise to a height at which fumes would not be objectionable to occupants of nearby buildings.

Another material found at the Central Heating Plant is terrazzo, found in brown tones combined with veined marble of the same color on the lobby's floor and on the stairs steps.