The Lewis Tower is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Edmun Gilchrist, and built in 1929, for a reported $35.0 million dollars, in Philadelphia, PA.
Lewis Tower is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Aria.
Its precise street address is 225 South 15th Street, Philadelphia, PA. You can also find it on the map here.
The building underwent a major restoration between 2005 and 2009.
Edmun Gilchrist 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 Lewis Tower a reality:
The Lewis Tower can be categorized as an Art-deco building.
The Art Deco movement flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, with many historians marking the outbreak of World War II as its final decline. Even though a couple of decades might not seem as much, the Art Deco movement had a great impact on architecture, and it's widely represented in many American cities due to the development boom that happened during that time.
Art Deco marked the abandonment of traditional historicism and the embracement of modern living and the age of the machine. In architecture, that meant leaving behind the ornaments of Beux-Arts and Neo-Gothic buildings and instead favoring simplicity and visual impact through geometric shapes, clean lines, and symmetrical designs. Ornaments were still an important part of the design, but they became bold and lavish, and were often inspired by ancient cultures or industrial imagery, instead of nature.
The Lewis Tower was completed in 1929, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.
The Lewis Tower reaches an architectural height of 390ft (119m). It has a total of 33 floors.
When it opened its doors to the public in 1929, the Lewis Tower was primarily used as Commercial space. That however, is no longer the case, and today it mainly provides Residential space.
The Lewis 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.
