Reynolds Arcade Building

The Reynolds Arcade Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Gordon & Kaelber, and built between 1932 and 1933 in Rochester, NY.

Its precise street address is 16 E.Main Street, Rochester, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The Reynolds Arcade Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Rochester 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 Reynolds Arcade Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on October 4^th 1985.

At the time of its completion in 1933 the Reynolds Arcade Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included the acoustical treatment of ceilings to deaden noise and clatter. The building also incorporated air conditioning for its offices, which was a first for Rochester at the time.

Gordon & Kaelber was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

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

The Reynolds Arcade Building was completed in 1933, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Reynolds Arcade 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 a base of polished black granite up to the second floor with commercial windows and a main entrance. Above, a central tower with five sections and eleven floors rises, set back from the fifth floor and flanked by two bodies of 4 sections and 10 levels. All of them are covered with Indiana limestone. The decorative metal from the main entrance rises to the fourth floor with a stylized eagle topping it off. The spandrels between the windows are also metal with an upward-facing date point design.

Other materials found at the Reynolds Arcade Building include, steel, used for the elevator doors, and marble , found on the lobby's walls in a light cream veined color.