1411 Fourth Avenue Building

The 1411 Fourth Avenue Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Robert C. Reamer, and built between 1928 and 1928, for a reported $1.10 million dollars, in Seattle, WA.

Its precise street address is 1411 Fourth Avenue, Seattle, WA. You can also find it on the map here.

The 1411 Fourth Avenue Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Seattle 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 1411 Fourth Avenue Building was officially declared as a national landmark on July 14^th 1989, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places on April 22^nd 1991.

At the time of its completion in 1928 the 1411 Fourth Avenue Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included automatic elevators and water springs in the floors to reduce fatigue in the office staff.

Robert C. Reamer 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 Teufel & Carlson as the Main Contractor.

The 1411 Fourth Avenue Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The 1411 Fourth Avenue Building was completed in 1928, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The 1411 Fourth Avenue 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 main entrance door with gold chevrons, recessed window spandrels that create vertical pillars along the facade and some delicate ornamientation at the base and top of the building.

Other materials found at the 1411 Fourth Avenue Building include, polished bronze, found in the entrance vestibule, storefronts and elevator doors, and Honduran mahogany, a dark green, creamy-veined marble used to decorate the lobby's walls.