Industrial Trust Building

The Industrial Trust Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed between 1925 and 1926 by Walker & Gillette, in association with Martin & Hall, and built between 1927 and 1928 in Providence, RI.

Industrial Trust Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Superman Building.
• Industrial Trust Tower.
• Fleet Bank Tower between 1982 and 2004.
• Bank of America Building between 2004 and 2008.

Its precise street address is 111 Westminster Street, 55 Kennedy Plaza, Providence, RI. You can also find it on the map here.

The Industrial Trust Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Providence 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 Industrial Trust Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on October 31^st 1984.

The building is popularly known as the "Superman Building" due to its resemblance to the Daily Planet newspaper headquarters in the 1950s American television series, The Adventures of Superman.

Walker & Gillette was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Martin & Hall.

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 Industrial Trust Building a reality:

• Starret Brothers in charge of Structural Engineering
• Industrial Trust Company as the Main Developer

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

The Industrial Trust Building was designed in 1925, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Industrial Trust 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 two-story base clad in Deer Island granite and adorned with classical motifs. Above this base rises the 26-story building covered in Indiana limestone. The central tower is surrounded by a stepped pyramidal mass with pronounced setbacks starting from the 15th, 22nd, and 26th floors.

At street level, the entrances to both Kennedy Square and Westminster St are marked by bronze doors.