Washington Athletic Club

The Washington Athletic Club is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Sherwood D. Ford, and built between 1929 and 1930, for a reported $2.50 million dollars, in Seattle, WA.

Its precise street address is 1325 6th Avenue, Seattle, WA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Washington Athletic Club 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 Washington Athletic Club was officially declared as a national landmark on March 11^th 2008.

Sherwood D. Ford 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 Wallace Bridge Company as the Main Contractor.

The Washington Athletic Club can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Washington Athletic Club 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 Washington Athletic Club 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 decorated tan bricks on both it's base and tower. The three story base that's horizontally divided by a wide intermediate cornice. At ground level, strips of black marble and bronce suround the shopping windows.