The Century Apartments Building

The The Century Apartments Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Irwin S. Chanin, and built between 1930 and 1931, for a reported $6.50 million dollars, in New York, NY.

Its precise street address is 25 Central Park West, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The The Century 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 The Century Apartments Building was officially declared as a national landmark on July 9^th 1985, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places on November 9^th 1982.

The building underwent a major restoration in 1992.

Irwin S. Chanin 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 Jacques Delamarre.

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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Chanin Construction Company as the Main Contractor.

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

The The Century Apartments 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 The Century 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 an ochre-colored stone cladding up to the second floor, with a base of pink granite, which also frames the main entrance. The remaining part of the facade combines toasted bricks with brown bricks. The windows are horizontally separated by rust-colored decorative bricks, with concrete sills located beneath each window.

Other materials found at the The Century Apartments Building include, white metal, used for the gilles of some doors, wood, used for the floors, and brass, which can be seen in the frames and grilles of the main door.