Reynolds Building

The Reynolds Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1927 by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, and built between 1928 and 1929, for a reported $2.70 million dollars, in Winston-Salem, NC.

Reynolds Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The Reynolds Building is also known, or has been known as, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company Office Building, Kimpton Cardinal Hotel, Cardinal Hotel & Residences, Reynolds American Tower, or Grand Old Lady.

Its precise street address is 51 E. 4th Street, Winston Salem, NC. You can also find it on the map here.

The Reynolds Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Winston-Salem 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 Reynolds Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on August 19^th 2014.

The building has been restored 4 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1982, 1987, 1999 and 2016.

Shreve, Lamb & Harmon 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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was James Baird Company as the Main Contractor.

The Reynolds Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Reynolds 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 Reynolds 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 an eight-by-eight bay ziggurat tower that rises to twenty-two stories from a nine-story base. The setbacks are visible on the seventeenth, nineteenth, and twenty-first levels. The rest of the building forms the base, which extends both north and east to create the U-shaped footprint or plan from the second to the ninth-floor levels, with the arms extending towards the north.

The two-story revolving main door with a grid ornamented with tracery and the windows at street level are made of Benedict metal (alpaca). The portal is flanked by two, double-bay, tripartite show windows and historical glass and metal lamps between.".

Other materials found at the Reynolds Building include, Missouri marble, found in relief panels walls and floors in gray-brown color, Belgium marble, found in walls and floor in black color, France marble, found in walls and floors in beige color, brass, used in grillwork, elevator doors and door frames, and terrazzo, found in diferent colors in the lobby's floor solar desing with a large circle delineated with alpaca.