United Shoe Machinery Corporation Building

The United Shoe Machinery Corporation Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Parker, Thomas & Rice, and built between 1929 and 1930 in Boston, MA.

Its precise street address is 160 Federal Street, Boston, MA. You can also find it on the map here.

The United Shoe Machinery Corporation Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Boston 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 United Shoe Machinery Corporation Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, and was also included in the Boston Register of Historic Places in 1983.

Parker, Thomas & Rice was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about George W. Fuller.

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 United Shoe Machinery Corporation as the Main Developer.

The United Shoe Machinery Corporation Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The United Shoe Machinery Corporation 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 United Shoe Machinery Corporation 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 limestone used for the street-level wall cladding, combined with black granite, with reforced steel is used for the piers than enphasize the vertical thrust. Dark sand colored bricks, stones and metal are the major decorativo elements at street level.

Other materials found at the United Shoe Machinery Corporation Building include, gold-colored glaced tiles, used for the penhouse roof, cast stone, seen in flat rectanguar blocks as decoration on the upper parts of the ziggurat and surrounding of the monumental store door, frosted glass, found in in lighting fixtures, and bronze, used in doors and lobby windows complements.