20 Exchange Place Building

The 20 Exchange Place Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Cross & Cross and built between 1930 and 1931 in New York, NY.

20 Exchange Place Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as City Bank-Farmers Trust Building.

Its precise street address is 20 Exchange Place, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The 20 Exchange Place Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of New York 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 20 Exchange Place Building was officially declared as a national landmark on June 25^th 1996.

At the time of its completion in 1931 the 20 Exchange Place Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included a telephone exchange, the largest pneumatic tube system in the world, and a deposit in the basement that pumped soap to all bathrooms.

Cross & Cross was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

Cross & Cross was in charge of the architectural design, however, architecture is a complex discipline, which usually involves 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 George A. Fuller Company as the Main Contractor.

The 20 Exchange Place Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The 20 Exchange Place Building was completed in 1931, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The 20 Exchange Place 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 non-load bearing either, as it is common in frame structure type buildings.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features Mohegan Granite and Alabama Rockwood Limestone as the two main materials that give the building its light-colored image.