500 Fifth Avenue Building

The 500 Fifth Avenue Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1929 by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, and built between 1930 and 1931, for a reported $4.00 million dollars, in New York, NY.

500 Fifth Avenue Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Salmon Tower II.

Its precise street address is Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The 500 Fifth Avenue 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 500 Fifth Avenue Building was officially declared as a national landmark on December 14^th 2010.

Shreve, Lamb & Harmon 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 500 Fifth Avenue Building a reality:

• McClintic-Marshall Co. in charge of Structural Engineering
• Charles T. Wills Inc. as the Main Contractor
• Walter J. Salmon Sr as the Main Developer
• Edward Amateis as the collaborating Artist

The 500 Fifth Avenue Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The 500 Fifth Avenue 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 500 Fifth Avenue 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 a terracotta cladding on the majoity of its surface. Surrounding the main entrance though, there are limestone plates combined with bronze. Starting from the fourth floor, the dark terracotta panelsa are also combined with bricks.