The DuMont Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by J.E.R. Carpenter, and built in 1931 in New York, NY.
DuMont Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as 515 Madison avenue.
Its precise street address is 515 Madison Avenue, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.
The building underwent a major restoration in 2009.
J.E.R. Carpenter 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 John H. Carpenter.
The DuMont Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.
The Art Deco movement flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, with many historians marking the outbreak of World War II as its final decline. Even though a couple of decades might not seem as much, the Art Deco movement had a great impact on architecture, and it's widely represented in many American cities due to the development boom that happened during that time.
Art Deco marked the abandonment of traditional historicism and the embracement of modern living and the age of the machine. In architecture, that meant leaving behind the ornaments of Beux-Arts and Neo-Gothic buildings and instead favoring simplicity and visual impact through geometric shapes, clean lines, and symmetrical designs. Ornaments were still an important part of the design, but they became bold and lavish, and were often inspired by ancient cultures or industrial imagery, instead of nature.
The DuMont 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 DuMont Building reaches an architectural height of 531ft (162m). It has a total of 42 floors, which combined offer a total of 247,570 sqf (23,000m2) of usable space.
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1931, the DuMont Building has mainly been used as Commercial space.
The DuMont 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 stone slabs covering the first three levels of the building. Gray brick continues the facade with ornamental borders beneath the windows, which highlighting each level .
Other materials found at the DuMont Building include, glass, found at the entrance's canopy, metal, used for the semicircular arch frames on level two and in the canopy´s framework, and speckled black marble, used on the entry arch.
