Sun Oil Building

The Sun Oil Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Tilden, Register & Pepper, and built between 1928 and 1929 in Philadelphia, PA.

Its precise street address is 1608-1610 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Sun Oil 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 Sun Oil Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on August 25^th 1983, and was also included in the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places on February 2^nd 1984.

Tilden, Register & Pepper was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

The Sun Oil Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Sun Oil Building 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 Sun Oil 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 terracotta cladding covering the base up to the third floor, continuing with spandrels and vertical brick columns. Above the entrance door, there is a large glass window with decorated panels.