Fred F. French Building

The Fred F. French Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1925 by H.Douglas Ives, and built between 1926 and 1927 in New York, NY.

Its precise street address is 551Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The Fred F. French 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 Fred F. French Building was officially declared as a national landmark on March 18^th 1986, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places on January 28^th 2004.

At the time of its completion in 1927 the Fred F. French Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included automatic elevators and conveniently controllable ventilation and lighting systems.

The building underwent a major restoration between 1985 and 1990. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates.

H.Douglas Ives 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 Sloan & Robertston.

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 Fred F. French Building a reality:

• Clyde R. Place in charge of Structural Engineering
• Otis as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Fred F. French as the Main Developer
• Vincent Glinsky as the collaborating Artist

The Fred F. French Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Fred F. French Building was completed in 1927, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Fred F. French 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 mostly bricks, combined with limestone moldings and friezes. The main entrances are highlighted by bronze arches, and so are the friezes on the first floor. Terracotta bands in various colors adorn the facade. The column capitals are covered with green ceramic, and red, orange, gold and green tiles decorate the top of the building.

Other materials found at the Fred F. French Building include, italian travertine, seen on the lobby floors combined with white and black marble, bronze, used for the revolving doors, lobby showcases, elevator doors and chandeliers in the hall, Genevieve marble, found cladding some walls, and wood , found on the doors and some offices' floors.