The Bell Telephone Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by John Torrey Windrim, and built in 1931 in Pittsburgh, PA.
Bell Telephone Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Verizon Building.
Its precise street address is 416 7th Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA. You can also find it on the map here.
John Torrey Windrim 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 W.F. Trimble & Sons Company as the Main Contractor.
The Bell Telephone Building 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 Bell Telephone 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 Bell Telephone Building reaches an architectural height of 338ft (103m). It has a total of 21 floors, 20 above ground and 1 basements.
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1931, the Bell Telephone Building has mainly been used as Commercial space.
The Bell Telephone 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.
