Medical Dental Building

The Medical Dental Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Arthur J. Rife Construction, and built between 1928 and 1929, for a reported $1.00 million dollars, in Dallas, TX.

Its precise street address is 351 W. Jefferson Blvd, Dallas, TX. You can also find it on the map here.

The Medical Dental Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Dallas 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 Medical Dental Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on November 17^th 2000.

The building has been restored 4 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1950, 1970, 1983 and 1999.

Arthur J. Rife Construction was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

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

The Medical Dental Building was completed in 1929, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Medical Dental 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 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 terracotta ashlar treatment on the ground floor, continued with buff-colored, textured bricks. The central section of the facade is defined by vertical pilasters that extend above the cornice line to become four terracotta and glass lanterns. The windows alternate frames between sash wood frames and decorated terracotta frames. All sections except the ends have decorative terracotta lintels. The rear elevation lacks ornamentation or pilasters and the windows have terracotta sills and brick lintels..

Other materials found at the Medical Dental Building include, terrazo, found on the floors throughout the building, and plaster, used on the upper floors' corridors walls and ceilings, as well as in the lobby walls and upper walls wainscot.