70 Pine Street Building

The 70 Pine Street Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Clinton & Russell, Holton & George, and built between 1930 and 1932, for a reported $7.00 million dollars, in New York, NY.

70 Pine 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 building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• 60 Wall Tower.
• Cities Service Building until 1965.
• American International Building from 1976 until this day.

Its precise street address is 70 Pine Street, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The 70 Pine 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 Art Deco style. Because of that, the 70 Pine Street Building was officially included in the New York Register of Historic Places on June 21^st 2011.

At the time of its completion in 1932 the 70 Pine Street Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included the use of escalators, which were rare in large office buildings back then. The building also included a ventilation system which was incorporated inside the walls and over the radiators.

Clinton & Russell, Holton & George 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 70 Pine Street Building a reality:

• Taylor Fichter Steel Construction in charge of Structural Engineering
• James Stewart & Co. Builders as the Main Contractor
• Otis as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Rose Associates as the Main Developer
• Rene Paul Chambellan as the collaborating Artist

The 70 Pine Street Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The 70 Pine Street Building was completed in 1932, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The 70 Pine 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 a Minnesota granite and red and black Morton gneiss cladding. The lower facade floors are clad in light Indiana limestone, with bricks in four shades of beige continuing up to the top. Aluminum is used for the facade ornamentation.

Other materials found at the 70 Pine Street Building include, glass , used for the 8m lantern, stainless steel, found at the pinnacle that serves as the base of the building's spire, marble, different colors of European marbles are used in the lobby walls. White and pink marble panels arranged in a checkerboard pattern were used on the floors , and plaster, used in the ceilings.