Woolworth Building

The Woolworth Building is a Neogothic skyscraper designed by Cass Gilbert, and built between 1910 and 1913, for a reported $13.5 million dollars, in New York, NY.

Woolworth Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as The Cathedral of Commerce.

Its precise street address is 233 Broadway, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The Woolworth 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 Neogothic style. Because of that, the Woolworth Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on November 13^th 1966, and was also included in the New York Register of Historic Places on April 12^th 1983.

The Woolworth Building has received multiple architecture awards for its architectural design since 1913. The following is a list of such prizes and awards:

• Renovation Award of Excellence in 2021
• 2021 CTBUH Awards in 2021

At the time of its completion in 1913 the Woolworth Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included a full-blown power station, with four engines producing enough electricity to serve a town of 50,000 residents. It operated as a self-contained system capable of powering all the building’s lighting, heating, ventilation, and elevator functions.

The building has been restored 3 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1932, 1981 and 2019.

Cass Gilbert 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 Woolworth Building a reality:

• Gunvald Aus, Kort Berle in charge of Structural Engineering
• Thompson–Starrett Co as the Main Contractor
• Otis Elevator Company as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Frank W. Woolworth as the Main Developer

The Woolworth Building can be categorized as a Neogothic building.

The Woolworth Building was completed in 1913. These were the late days of the Neogothic movement, which had been around for almost 200 years at the time.

Art-deco would soon take over US architecture, and therefore, even though Cass Gilbert didn't venture into what was cutting edge in terms of style at the time, and took instead a more conservative approach to the design of the Woolworth Building, it is possible that the design already started showing some traits that would later become characteristic of the art-deco movement.

The Woolworth Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and steel 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 very light-colored limestone and ornamental terracotta.

The building is full of elaborate decorative details such as gargoyles, pinnacles, and sculpted figures. As it rises, the structure visually narrows, culminating in a tower adorned with pinnacles, intricate ornamental detailing and a copper roof .