Buffalo City Hall

The Buffalo City Hall is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Dietel, Wade & Jones, and built between 1929 and 1932, for a reported $6.85 million dollars, in Buffalo, NY.

Its precise street address is 65 Niagara Square, Buffalo, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The Buffalo City Hall is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Buffalo 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 Buffalo City Hall was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on January 15^th 1999.

Following the building regulations of the time, tall buildings couldn't reach their maximum height all at once. To allow the entry of light and air on the street, the Buffalo City Hall also had to step back as the building rose .

The building underwent a major restoration in 2002. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was HHL Architects.

Dietel, Wade & Jones 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 Buffalo City Hall a reality:

• DiDonato Associates Engineering and Architecture, P.C. in charge of Structural Engineering
• John W. Cowper Company as the Main Contractor
• Curtis Elevator Company, and Otis as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Rene Paul Chambellan, Albert Stewart, William de Leftwich Dodge, and Lippich Brothers as the collaborating Artist

The Buffalo City Hall can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Buffalo City Hall was completed in 1932, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Buffalo City Hall 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, sandstones, and terracotta ornaments.

The top of the tower is surrounded by a railing made of polychromatic terracotta pieces in a V shape.

Other materials found at the Buffalo City Hall include, acustic tiles, found in bright colors on the semicircular ceiling and walls of the Common Council Chamber, woodcarving, seen in carver doors and ornamental figures , marble, used in brown color in the frame of the triple doorway Common Council Chamber doors, bronze , used for some grillwork between tinted-glass windows, and decorated glass, found in the Common Council Chamber skylight. The glass is structured in seven concentrics circles in orange and yellow colors.