40 Wall Street Building

The 40 Wall Street Building is a Neogothic skyscraper designed by H.Craig Severance, in association with Yasuo Matsui, and built between 1929 and 1930 in New York, NY.

40 Wall Street Building 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 40 Wall Street Building is also known, or has been known as, Bank of Manhattan Trust Building, Manhattan Company Building, or Trump Building.

Its precise street address is 40 Wall Street, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The 40 Wall Street 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 Neogothic style. Because of that, the 40 Wall Street Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on June 16^th 2000, and was also included in the New York Register of Historic Places on December 12^th 1995.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1963 and 1995.

H.Craig Severance was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Yasuo Matsui. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Shreve & Lamb.

H.Craig Severance and the other architects already mentioned were 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 here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the 40 Wall Street Building a reality:

• Purdy y Henderson in charge of Structural Engineering
• Starrett Corporation as the Main Contractor
• Bank of Manhattan Trust Company as the Main Developer
• Morrell Smith, Walker & Gillette in charge of Interior Design

The 40 Wall Street Building can be categorized as a Neogothic building.

The 40 Wall Street Building was completed in 1930. These were the late days of the Neogothic movement, which had been around for almost 200 years at the time.

Art-deco would soon take over US architecture, and therefore, even though H.Craig Severance didn't venture into what was cutting edge in terms of style at the time, and took instead a more conservative approach to the design of the 40 Wall Street Building, it is possible that the design already started showing some traits that would later become characteristic of the art-deco movement.

The 40 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.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features buff-colored bricks making up the two walls that form the facade, the inner fire protection, and the outer layer as the facade's cladding. On the first floor the facade is cladded in granite. A limestone colonnade pilasters were used to decorate the facade from the second to the fifth floor.

Other materials found at the 40 Wall Street Building include, lead-coated copper, found in the pyramidal roof, terracotta, used for the ornamentals panels and floors, and cast-iron , used in windows frames.