One Liberty Place Building

The One Liberty Place Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed between 1984 and 1985 by Murphy/Jahn Architects, with Helmut Jahn as lead architect, and built between 1985 and 1987 in Philadelphia, PA.

Its precise street address is 1650 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA. You can also find it on the map here.

The One Liberty Place Building has received multiple architecture awards for its architectural design since 1987. The following is a list of such prizes and awards:

• TOBY Award in 2017
• TOBY Awards in 2018

The One Liberty Place, together with the Two Liberty Place, the Shops at Liberty Place shopping mall and the Westin Philadelphia Hotel, make up the Liberty Place Complex.

The One Liberty Place used to have an observatory deck, but it was permanently closed in September 2021.

Murphy/Jahn Architects, with Helmut Jahn as the lead architect, 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 One Liberty Place Building a reality:

• Lev Zetlin Associates in charge of Structural Engineering
• LF Driscoll as the Main Contractor
• Otis Elevator Company as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Rouse and Associates as the Main Developer
• WSP Flack + Kurtz in charge of MEP Engineering

The One Liberty Place Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The One Liberty Place Building was designed in 1984. At that time Postmodernism was the prevailing style. Fresh, bold and daring, architects were exploring the freedom of designing without having to follow the strict, sometimes arbitrary rules of a specific architectural movement (which ironically became a movement itself). The One Liberty Place Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The One Liberty Place Building uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with steel columns and concrete slabs.

A framed tube-in-tube structure uses a central core, known as inner tube, which usually holds stairs, lifts and installations, and a perimeter of columns around it, which form the exterior tube. The interior tube is tipically more massive (often made of reinforced concrete), and the exterior tube is "lighter" (made of steel or concrete columns). Both tubes are conencted via horizontal elements which make up the floors and also transmit any horizontal froces from the facade to the core.

The facade employs a non-load bearing curtain wall system. This means the curtain wall modules are anchored to the building's structural frame at the edges of the floor slabs. The perimeter columns are set back slightly from the facade, allowing them to remain independent of the curtain wall system.

This configuration enables a completely free design of the curtain wall, unencumbered by structural elements, thus providing greater flexibility in aesthetic choices and maximizing the visual impact of the exterior.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a blue-tinted glass curtain wall with horizontal bands of granite.

The angular setbacks of the spire are particularly notable, reflecting a strong influence from the Chrysler Building and ending in a thin spire.