The Naval Hospital Philadelphia is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Karcher and Smith, and built between 1933 and 1935, for a reported $3.19 million dollars, in Philadelphia, PA.
The exact addresss of the building was Pattison Avenue between South Broad St. to 20th St., Philadelphia, PA. However, you won't be able to find it there anymore, since it was demolished in 2001, 66 year after opening its doors to the public.
Karcher and Smith 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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Louis Berger & Associates as the Main Contractor.
The Naval Hospital Philadelphia 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 Naval Hospital Philadelphia was completed in 1935 during the last stretch of waht's officially considered to be the duration of the Art Deco movement. As a late-commer of the Art Deco movement and reflects the mature and refined characteristics of the style.
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1935, the Naval Hospital Philadelphia has mainly been used as Medical space.
With 650 beds throughout its 15 floors, the hospital is publicly funded.
The Naval Hospital Philadelphia 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.
Other materials found at the Naval Hospital Philadelphia include, ananodized aluminum, used for the heater grates, and marble panels, found around the vestibule gates.
