Powhatan Apartments

The Powhatan Apartments is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1927 by Charles L. Morgan & Robert De Golyer, and built between 1928 and 1929 in Chicago, IL.

Its precise street address is 4950 South Chicago Beach Drive, Chicago, IL. You can also find it on the map here.

The Powhatan Apartments is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Chicago 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 Powhatan Apartments was officially declared as a national landmark on January 12^th 1993.

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 1950, 2005 and 2017.

Charles L. Morgan & Robert De Golyer was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

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 here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Powhatan Apartments a reality:

• Charles B. Johnson & Son as the Main Contractor
• Garard Trust as the Main Developer

The Powhatan Apartments can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Powhatan Apartments 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 Powhatan Apartments uses a frame structure made of 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 Indiana limestone and terracotta on its two principal elevations, with some ornamental terracotta panels.

Other materials found at the Powhatan Apartments include, maple and sycamore veneer wood, used in the elevator cabin decoration, and glass, also found in the etched mirrors of the elevators to complete the decoration.