Home Savings Bank Building

The Home Savings Bank Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Dennison & Hirons, and built in 1927 in Albany, NY.

Home Savings Bank Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Home Savings Bank of the City of Albany Building.

Its precise street address is 11 North Pearl Street, Albany, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

When it was completed in 1927, the Home Savings Bank was the tallest building in Albany, NY.

Even though the building is not cataloged, it was included as a contributing property to the catalogation of the Downton Albany Historic Dsitric in 1980, when it was included in the National Register of Historic Places.

Dennison & Hirons 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 Rene Paul Chambellan as the collaborating Artist.

The Home Savings Bank Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Home Savings Bank Building was completed in 1927, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Home Savings Bank 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 three-level base clad in light terracotta, followed by a dark-colored brick facade all the way to the top of the building. From the 15th floor onwards, the facade exhibits a series of setbacks and decorations in metal and terracotta, combined with double-height arched windows. These decorative elements show images of Native Americans and settlers.

At street level The main entrance is framed into a double high recess, with two equally high windows on either side. Above this frame, and just before the facade changes from light color to dark color, the name of the building together with the dates of the foundation of the bank and the construction of the building are engraved into the terracotta.

Other materials found at the Home Savings Bank Building include, tin, found in the high decorative lobby ceiling, cherry wood, used to ornate crown molding and pillars, and marble, used in floors and walls.