Master Apartments Building

The Master Apartments Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Helmle, Corbett & Harrison, and built between 1928 and 1929, for a reported $1.93 million dollars, in New York, NY.

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

Its precise street address is 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The Master Apartments 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 Master Apartments Building was officially declared as a national landmark on December 5^th 1989, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places on February 23^rd 2016.

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, 1996, 2004 and 2005.

Helmle, Corbett & Harrison 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 Sugarman & Berger.

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 Master Apartments Building a reality:

• Longacre Construction Company as the Main Contractor
• Louis L.Horch,Nettie Horch as the Main Developer

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

The Master Apartments 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 Master Apartments 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 stamped bricks in deep purple tones at the base that turn to gray tones on the upper floors, with an ornamental cap. There is a brick pattern at the base, entrance trim, and spandrel panels, along with terracotta cresting at the edges of the terrace parapets. The glass doors at the entrnce are framed by a mirrored glass and sidelightss.

Other materials found at the Master Apartments Building include, terrazzo, used in geometric patterns on some floors, aluminum, with geometrics motifs was in elevator doors, as well as for the octagoal light fixtures in the lobby, and limeston, used in lobby floor, baseeboards, staircase and balustrades.