Grant Building

The Grant Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Henry Hornbostel, and built between 1927 and 1930, for a reported $5.50 million dollars, in Pittsburgh, PA.

Its precise street address is 310 Grant Street, Pittsburgh, PA. You can also find it on the map here.

At the time of its completion in 1930 the Grant Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included an illuminated beacon atop the building, flashing the word "Pittsburgh" in Morse code, which warned pilots flying at night of the skyscraper's presence. Less of a technological advancement, but still worth pointing out is the fact that every floor was equipped with a shower, something which was not common (and still isn't) for an office building.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2006.

Henry Hornbostel was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Eric Fisher Wood.

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 Grant Building a reality:

• Dwight P. Robinson & Company as the Main Contractor
• W. J. Strassburger as the Main Developer

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

The Grant Building was completed in 1930, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Grant 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 Swedish and Belgian granite wrapping the lower floors of the building, while limestone, buff brick, and cast stone were used above that base.