Graybar Building

The Graybar Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Sloan & Robertson, and built between 1925 and 1927 in New York, NY.

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

Its precise street address is 420 Lexington Ave, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The Graybar 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 Graybar Building was officially declared as a national landmark on November 22^nd 2016.

The building underwent a major restoration between 1998 and 1999. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Beyer Blinder Belle.

Sloan & Robertson 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 Graybar Building a reality:

• Clyde R. Place in charge of Structural Engineering
• Graybar as the Main Developer
• Edward Trumbull as the collaborating Artist

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

The Graybar 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 Graybar 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 an Indiana limestone panels cladding on its base, with black bricks in the spandrels of some windows.

Other materials found at the Graybar Building include, travertine, used in walls and arches of the Graybar Passage, bronze, found in chandeliers and ornaments , and lead, a sheet of lead was embedded within the concrete foundations to absorb vibrations.