The 120 Wall Street Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Buchanan & Kahn Architects, and built between 1929 and 1930, for a reported $12.0 million dollars, in New York, NY.
Its precise street address is 120 Wall Street, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.
The building underwent a major restoration in 2013.
Buchanan & Kahn Architects was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.
The 120 Wall Street Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.
The Art Deco movement flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, with many historians marking the outbreak of World War II as its final decline. Even though a couple of decades might not seem as much, the Art Deco movement had a great impact on architecture, and it's widely represented in many American cities due to the development boom that happened during that time.
Art Deco marked the abandonment of traditional historicism and the embracement of modern living and the age of the machine. In architecture, that meant leaving behind the ornaments of Beux-Arts and Neo-Gothic buildings and instead favoring simplicity and visual impact through geometric shapes, clean lines, and symmetrical designs. Ornaments were still an important part of the design, but they became bold and lavish, and were often inspired by ancient cultures or industrial imagery, instead of nature.
The 120 Wall Street 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 120 Wall Street Building reaches an architectural height of 446ft (136m). It has a total of 33 floors, served by 8 elevators.
The building sits on a 22,604 sqf (2,100m2) piece of land , and offers a total of 614,619 sqf (57,100m2) of usable space.
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1930, the 120 Wall Street Building has mainly been used as Commercial space.
The 120 Wall Street 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 red granite plates framing the windows of the first five levels, followed by light-colored limestone.
Other materials found at the 120 Wall Street Building include, marble, found on the floor and walls of the lobby, and bronze, used on the entrance door frames and in the large grille over it.
