30 Rockefeller Plaza Buiding

The 30 Rockefeller Plaza Buiding is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1931 by Howells & Hood, and built between 1932 and 1933 in New York, NY.

30 Rockefeller Plaza Buiding 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 building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• RCA Building between 1933 and 1988.
• GE Building between 1988 and 2015.
• Comcast Building from 2015 until this day.

Its precise street address is 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The 30 Rockefeller Plaza Buiding 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 30 Rockefeller Plaza Buiding was officially declared as a national landmark on April 23^rd 1985.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2014.

Howells & Hood was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

But that's not all, there was also a whole team of architects involved, which included: Reinhard & Hofmeister, and Corbett Harrison & MacMurray.

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 30 Rockefeller Plaza Buiding a reality:

• Edwards & Hjorth; H.G. Balcom & Associates in charge of Structural Engineering
• Westinghouse as the company in charge of the elevators system
• John D. Rockefeller Jr. as the Main Developer
• Lee Lawrie as the collaborating Artist

The 30 Rockefeller Plaza Buiding can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The 30 Rockefeller Plaza Buiding was completed in 1933, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The 30 Rockefeller Plaza Buiding 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 Deer Island granite cladding on the first floor, with the rest of the building being cladded with limestone brought from Indiana and prefabricated aluminum parapets.

Other materials found at the 30 Rockefeller Plaza Buiding include, gray marble, used in the lobby walls, bronze, found in moldings walls and rectangular floor patterns, and black terrazo , used for the interior floors.