Two Liberty Place Building

The Two Liberty Place Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Murphy/Jahn Architects, with Helmut Jahn as lead architect, in association with Zeidler Partnership Architects, and built between 1988 and 1990 in Philadelphia, PA.

Its precise street address is 1601 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA. You can also find it on the map here.

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

The building underwent a major restoration between 2005 and 2008. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Gensler.

Murphy/Jahn Architects, with Helmut Jahn as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Zeidler Partnership Architects.

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 Two Liberty Place Building a reality:

• Thornton Tomasetti in charge of Structural Engineering
• Rouse & Associates as the Main Developer

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

The Two Liberty Place Building was completed in 1990. By 1990 the Postmodernism movement was experiencing a transition. Critics argued that Postmodernism, initially a rebellious and innovative style, had become formulaic and commercialized, and so the trend started moving away from blending historical styles, irony, and playful ornamentation, and begun to give way to emerging architectural trends concerned with more present matters such as technology, ecology or sustainability.

The Two 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 stone on the lower levels, followed by a blue-toned steel and glass curtain wall.

The tower is crowned by a spire formed by gabled setbacks in a chevron shape.