1616 Walnut Street Building

The 1616 Walnut Street Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Tilden, Register & Pepper, and built between 1929 and 1930 in Philadelphia, PA.

Its precise street address is 1616 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA. You can also find it on the map here.

The 1616 Walnut Street Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Philadelphia 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 1616 Walnut Street Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on October 17^th 1983, and was also included in the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places on January 7^th 1982.

At the time of its completion in 1930 the 1616 Walnut Street Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included five covered parking levels.

Tilden, Register & Pepper 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 Wark & Co.

The 1616 Walnut Street Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The 1616 Walnut Street 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 1616 Walnut Street 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 raised brass canopy over the main entrance displaying the building's name. Above, a lattice of the same material with Art Deco motifs protects a glass window that rises 3 floors above the two entrance doors. Going up, the facade is made out of bricks, with darker spandrels that empathise the vertical lines and height of the building.