Southern Bell Telephone Company Building

The Southern Bell Telephone Company Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Marye, Alger and Vinour, and built in 1929 in Atlanta, GA.

Southern Bell Telephone Company Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as AT&T Communications Building.

Its precise street address is 51 Peachtree Center Avenue, Atlanta, GA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Southern Bell Telephone Company Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Atlanta 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 Southern Bell Telephone Company Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on June 6^th 1978.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1948 and 1963.

Marye, Alger and Vinour was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

The Southern Bell Telephone Company Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Southern Bell Telephone Company Building was completed in 1929, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Southern Bell Telephone Company 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 carved details on the stone along the first 6 stories. The main door stands out thanks to a stepped stone arch that frames a large window above the lintel.