The Sofia Building

The The Sofia Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Jardine, Hill & Murdock, and built between 1929 and 1930 in New York, NY.

The Sofia Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Kent Automatic Garage between 1930 and 1943.
• Sofia Brothers Warehouse between 1943 and 1983.
• The Sofia from 1983 until this day.

Its precise street address is 43 West 61st Satreet, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The The Sofia 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 Sofia Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on September 27^th 1984, and was also included in the New York Register of Historic Places on April 12^th 1983.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1943 and 1984.

Jardine, Hill & Murdock 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 The Sofia Building a reality:

• Post McCord in charge of Structural Engineering
• Kent Automatic Garages as the Main Developer

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

The The Sofia Building was completed in 1930, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The The Sofia 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 some elaborate Art Deco works in polychrome terracotta around the main entrance, formerly used as a car entrance, that rises two stories. The terracotta ornamentation is repeated in the horizontal bands that mark the building's setbacks. The rest of the facade is clad in orange brick with bands of black brick outlining the floors. The central windows are defined by vertical brick pillars.