Kennedy–Warren Apartment Building

The Kennedy–Warren Apartment Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Joseph Younger, and built between 1930 and 1931 in Washington DC, DC.

Its precise street address is 3133 Connecticut Avenue, Washington Dc, DC. You can also find it on the map here.

The Kennedy–Warren Apartment Building 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 Kennedy–Warren Apartment Building was officially declared as a national landmark in 1989, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places on July 27^th 1994.

At the time of its completion in 1931 the Kennedy–Warren Apartment Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included an air cooling system that used three large fans that sucked in fresh air at the back of the building and propelled it through the hallways.

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 1935, 2004 and 2011.

Joseph Younger 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: Alexander H.Sonneman, and Hartman-Cox.

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 Monroe y R. B. Warren, Inc. as the Main Contractor.

The Kennedy–Warren Apartment Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Kennedy–Warren Apartment Building was completed in 1931, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Kennedy–Warren Apartment 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.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a two-story limestone base with terracotta decorations above the windows. It features a four-pane glass entrance protected by a decorated aluminum canopy, above which rises a semicircular glass window with aluminum-framed stained glass panels, all within a setback central tower. It is considered the first apartment building in D.C. that incorporates aluminum to a wide degree. Above this base, the facade continues with cream, tan and brown bricks, decorated with aluminum spandrels under some windows, while others have inlaid bricks resembling a checkerboard pattern. Other design elements include vertical rows of molded bricks, limestone medallions, and gargoyles on the seventh floor, culminating in a pyramidal tower with a weathered copper roof, flanked by two limestone griffins.

Other materials found at the Kennedy–Warren Apartment Building include, marble, used on panels covering the pillars of the vestibule, bronze, found in the lowreliefs that decorate the walls of the vestibule, both polished and matte, on the railings of some stairs and on the sheets that cover the exposed surfaces of some roof beams, and wood, used on floors, except in kitchens and bathrooms. It is also located in the central area of the ballroom floor and decorated apartment doors.