American Radiator Building

The American Radiator Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Howells & Hood, and built between 1923 and 1924 in New York, NY.

American Radiator Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as American Standard Building.

Its precise street address is 40-52 W. 40th St, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The American Radiator 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 American Radiator Building was officially declared as a national landmark on November 12^th 1974, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places on May 7^th 1980.

At the time of its completion in 1924 the American Radiator Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included the elevator doors, which could be opened by pressing a button instead of doing it manually as in most other buildings back then.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2001.

Howells & Hood was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about André Fouilhoux.

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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Rene Paul Chambellan as the collaborating Artist.

The American Radiator Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The American Radiator Building was completed in 1924. These were the early days of the Art Deco movement, when the style hadn't yet reached its maturity, and there fore it is more likely to to still have traces of the Classical or Gothic Revival periods which preceded Art-Deco.

Howells & Hood took a risk by designing a building that was ahead of its time, and which other architects sure took inspiration from as the Art Deco movement evolved.

The American Radiator Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and 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 mostly black bricks, which gives the building its distinctive and misterious look, while also contrasting with the gold paint that covers the gothic motifs. On the ground floor black granite from Sweden was used instead of bricks, and the pinnacles of the tower are made out of terracotta..