Chanin Building

The Chanin Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Sloan & Robertson, and built between 1927 and 1929 in New York, NY.

Chanin Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as 122 East 42nd Street.

Its precise street address is 122 E 42nd St, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The Chanin 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 Chanin Building was officially declared as a national landmark on November 14^th 1978, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places on May 23^rd 1980.

At the time of its completion in 1929 the Chanin Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included the self-supporting tower at the top of the building, which broadcasted FM from 1941 to 1965. Below ground, the building contained a bus terminal, a movie theater, and a connection to Grand Central Terminal.

Sloan & Robertson 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 Jacques Delamarre.

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 Chanin Building a reality:

• Rene Paul Chambellan in charge of Interior Design
• Rene Paul Chambellan, Edward Trumbull as the collaborating Artist

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

The Chanin Building was completed in 1929, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Chanin 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 beige bricks and terracotta, the latter being found in the front friezes. Black Belgian marble was used in the base of the facade, around the storefronts, with a bronze frieze above. Limestone can also be seen in some pillars.

Other materials found at the Chanin Building include, bronze, found in the radiator grilles, mailboxes, elevator doors and ornamental reliefs, terrazo, used on the floors, toasted marble, found covering the walls and stairs steps, and floodlights, a battery of 212 lights illuminates the crowning of the tower.