The William-Oliver Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Pringle and Smith, and built in 1930 in Atlanta, GA.
Its precise street address is 32 Peachtree Street NW, Atlanta, GA. You can also find it on the map here.
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 1978 and 1996.
Pringle and Smith was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.
The William-Oliver Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.
The Art Deco movement flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, with many historians marking the outbreak of World War II as its final decline. Even though a couple of decades might not seem as much, the Art Deco movement had a great impact on architecture, and it's widely represented in many American cities due to the development boom that happened during that time.
Art Deco marked the abandonment of traditional historicism and the embracement of modern living and the age of the machine. In architecture, that meant leaving behind the ornaments of Beux-Arts and Neo-Gothic buildings and instead favoring simplicity and visual impact through geometric shapes, clean lines, and symmetrical designs. Ornaments were still an important part of the design, but they became bold and lavish, and were often inspired by ancient cultures or industrial imagery, instead of nature.
The William-Oliver Building was completed in 1930, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.
The William-Oliver Building reaches an architectural height of 207ft (63m). It has a total of 16 floors, which combined offer a total of 89,997 sqf (8,361m2) of usable space.
When it opened its doors to the public in 1930, the William-Oliver Building was primarily used as Commercial space. That however, is no longer the case, and today it mainly provides Residential space.
The William-Oliver Building has a total of 114 residential units throughout its 16 floors.
The William-Oliver 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 texan pink granite cladding the three first floors, and Indina limestone with terracotta details from there on.
Other materials found at the William-Oliver Building include, brass, used in main door frames, the big entrance canopy and elevator doors, and marble, found on lobby's and som upper floors flooring.
