Empire State Building

The Empire State Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1929 by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, and built between 1930 and 1931, for a reported $40.9 million dollars, in New York, NY.

Its precise street address is 350 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The Empire State 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 Empire State Building was officially declared as a national landmark on June 24^th 1986, and was also included in the New York Register of Historic Places on May 19^th 1981.

At the time of its completion in 1931 the Empire State Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included the world's first FM transmitter installed by RCA through an antenna located on the building's mast.

The building has been restored 5 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1979, 1990, 2009, 2010 and 2019.

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 Empire State Building a reality:

• Homer Gage Balcom in charge of Structural Engineering
• Starrett Brothers and Eken as the Main Contractor
• Otis as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Empire State Inc, John J. Raskov and Al Smith as the Main Developer
• Leif Neandross, Roy Sparkia and Renée Nemorov as the collaborating Artist

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

The Empire State 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 Empire State 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 light-colored Indiana limestone cladding on most of the facade, with modern stainless steel canopies over the two entrances, black granite on ground level, triple pane glass and metal grills over the main doors and up to the third level and aluminum frames for the first floor windows and doors.

Other materials found at the Empire State Building include, bronze, used for ornamental elements, marble, found on the lobby walls, terrazzo, used in zigzag patterns on floors, and aluminum, used in some reliefs.