Terminal Commerce Building

The Terminal Commerce Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Steele, William & Sons and built between 1929 and 1931, for a reported $4.00 million dollars, in Philadelphia, PA.

Terminal Commerce Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as North American Building.

Its precise street address is 401 N.Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Terminal Commerce 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 Terminal Commerce Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on July 24^th 1996.

At the time of its completion in 1931 the Terminal Commerce Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included being the first warehouse in the country with a freight station underneath it .

The building has been restored 3 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1955, 1980 and 2014.

Steele, William & Sons was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

Steele, William & Sons was in charge of the architectural design, however, architecture is a complex discipline, which usually involves 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 Reading Company as the Main Developer.

The Terminal Commerce Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Terminal Commerce Building was completed in 1931, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Terminal Commerce Building uses a frame structure made of concrete columns and beams.

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 of the building however, is load bearing. This doesn't imply that it is a traditional load-bearing wall. Rather, it means that the structure's exterior pillars have been pushed to the very edges, becoming integrated with the facade, and therefore, technically, a part of it.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features unglazed terracotta and Yellow Kittanning bricks in part of the front. Piers of unglazed terra cotta cover the framework of the window within the two-story base. The thin pillars that divide the windows into groups end at the roofline with a gentle crest of white terracotta. The central tower is faced with colorful polychromatic glazed terracotta.

Other materials found at the Terminal Commerce Building include, Tennessee marble, a brown-colored marble found in the lobby, and wood , used around entry doorways with transoms above many offices entries.