Carew Tower

The Carew Tower is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by W.W. Ahlschlager & Associates, and built between 1929 and 1931, for a reported $33.0 million dollars, in Cincinnati, OH.

Carew Tower is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza Hotel.

Its precise street address is 441 Vine Street , Cincinnati, OH. You can also find it on the map here.

The Carew Tower is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Cincinnati 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 Carew Tower was officially declared as a national landmark on March 30^th 1993, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places on April 19^th 1994.

At the time of its completion in 1931 the Carew Tower incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included advanced amenities for the time such as high-speed automatic elevators, an internal transmission system, and an automated parking system in its garage.

W.W. Ahlschlager & Associates 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 Delano & Aldrich.

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 Carew Tower a reality:

• Starrett Investment Corp. as the Main Contractor
• John J. Emery as the Main Developer
• René Paul Chambellan, Louis Grell as the collaborating Artist

The Carew Tower can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Carew Tower 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 Carew Tower 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 strong base with black polished granite pierced by large, single-pane display windows, followed by a rising shaft and a tapered top. The second floor wall material is composed of smooth limestone blocks. From the third floor and up to the top of the building, the facade is clad in simple yellow brick.

Other materials found at the Carew Tower include, metal, found in carpentry and works surrounding the elevators and lights, Rookwood Pottery floral tiles, used in adorns in the building's east and west entrances and in the basement parking garage, and marble, used in the main entrance walls, floors and stairs of the hotel.