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top ten Art Deco buildings

For a more complete list, see Art Deco (1925-1940)

Empire State Building

architect	Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, William F. Lamb as chief designer
location	350 Fifth Ave., bet. W33 and W34
date	1930-1931
style	Art Deco
construction	Steel frame 102 floors, 1252 feet, 381 meters high. Effective use of setbacks to emphasize tower. The building is clad in Indiana limestone and granite, with the mullions lined in shiny aluminium. There are in all 6,500 windows, with spandrels sandblasted to blend their tone to that of the windows, visually creating the vertical striping on the facade. The windows and spandrels are also flush with the limestone facing, an aesthetic and economic decision.
type	Office Building
	Click here for an Empire State Building gallery

The Empire State Building is a 102-story Art Deco skyscraper in New York City, New York at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street. Its name is derived from the nickname for the state of New York. It stood as the world's tallest building for more than forty years, from its completion in 1931 until construction of the World Trade Center's North Tower was completed in 1972. Following the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, the Empire State Building became for the second time, the tallest building in New York City.

The Empire State Building has been named by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. The building and its street floor interior are designated landmarks of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, and confirmed by the New York City Board of Estimate.[5] It was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1986. In 2007, it was ranked number one on the List of America's Favorite Architecture according to the AIA. The building is owned by Harold Helmsley's company and managed by its management/leasing division Helmsley-Spear.

Chrysler Building

architect	William Van Alen
location	405 Lexington Avenue at 42^nd Street
date	1928-1930
style	Art Deco
construction	77 floors, 319.5m (1048 feet) high, 29961 tons of steel, 3,826,000 bricks, near 5000 windows. Cost: $ 20,000,000 The building is clad in white brick and dark gray brickwork is used as horizontal decoration to enhance the window rows. The eccentric crescent-shaped steps of the spire (spire scaffolding) were made of stainless steel (or rather, similar nirosta chrome-nickel steel) as a stylized sunburst motif, and underneath it steel gargoyles, depicting American eagles (image), stare over the city. Sculptures modeled after Chrysler automobile radiator caps (image) decorate the lower setbacks, along with ornaments of car wheels. The three storeys high, upwards tapering entrance lobby has a triangular form, with entrances from three sides, Lexington Avenue, 42nd and 43rd Streets. The lobby is lavishly decorated with Red Moroccan marble walls, sienna-coloured floor and onyx, blue marble and steel in Art Deco compositions. The ceiling murals, painted by Edward Trumbull, praise the modern-day technical progress -- and of course the building itself and its builders at work. The lobby was refurbished in 1978 by JCS Design Assocs. and Joseph Pell Lombardi.
type	Office Building
	Click here for Chrysler Building gallery

Rockefeller Center

architect	Associated Architects
location	30 Rockefeller Plaza, bet W50 and W51. West 48^th to 51^st Streets between 5^th and 6^th Avenues
date	1931-1933
style	Art Deco
construction	Steel frame with limestone cladding
type	Office Building
	see also GE Building, originally RCA Building

Rockefeller Center is a complex of 19 commercial buildings covering 22 acres between 48th and 51st Streets in New York City. Built by the Rockefeller family, it is located in the center of Midtown Manhattan, spanning between Fifth Avenue and Seventh Avenue. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987. It is the largest privately held complex of its kind in the world, and an international symbol of modernist architectural style blended with capitalism.

General Electric Building

architect	Cross & Cross
location	570 Lexington Avenue at 51^st St.
date	1929-1931
style	Art Deco
construction	194,6m / 640.0ft, 50 floors salmon brick, terra-cotta The base is of rose-coloured granite, while the set-back mass above and the tower shaft are clad in glazed tan brick. The undoubtedly most striking feature of this 195 m tall building is its, indeed, flamboyant top, a curious mixture of Gothic spires in limestone and brickwork with wavy, filigree style decoration and lightning bolt motifs, depicting the electricity of radio transmission waves sent by the Radio Corporation of America. At night this "crown" of the building is illuminated from within, making the top look like a giant torch. The entrance lobby has a vaulted ceiling of aluminium plating with sunburst motifs and walls of light pink marble. The lamp fixtures are of aquamarine-colored glass.
type	Office Building

The General Electric Building is a historic 50-floor skyscraper in Midtown New York City, United States, at 570 Lexington Avenue (southwest corner of Lexington and 51st Street). Originally known as the "RCA Victor Building" when designed by Cross and Cross in 1931, and sometimes known by its address to avoid confusion with the later GE Building at 30 Rockefeller Center.

It backs up to the low Byzantine dome of St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue and shares the same salmon brick color. But from Lexington, the building is an insistently tall 50-floor stylized Gothic tower with its own identity, a classic Art Deco visual statement of suggested power through simplification. The base contains elaborate, generous masonry, architectural figural sculpture, and at on the corner above the main entrance, a conspicuous corner clock with the curvy GE logo and a pair of silver disembodied forearms. The crown of the building is a dynamic-looking burst of Gothic tracery, which is supposed to represent radio waves, and is lit from within at night.

Barclay-Vesey Building

architect	Ralph Walker of McKenzie, Voorhees & Gmelin.
location	140 West St.
date	1923
style	Art Deco
construction	steel structure, buff-brick
type	Office Building

Built in 1923-1927 for the New York Telephone Company and named after the streets that border it to the north and south.
The 152-meter building is considered to be the first Art Deco skyscraper and its designers were also awarded the Architectural League of New York's gold medal of honor for 1927 for fine expression of the new industrial age.
The form of the building was decided upon after studies of relation between land cost (large ground area) and construction cost (a tall building): a 32-storey design was chosen as the most economical. The massive form with floors of 4,830 m² without any light courts was possible because the telephone installations didn't require natural light. The frame of the building is constructed in steel and concrete, with the sturdy floor plates designed to support the original mechanical switching centers.
Drawing from Saarinen's Chicago Tribune competition entry, the brick-clad building is topped with a short, sturdy tower, with the vertical piers ending on "battlements" on top and with sculptural ornaments on the setbacks. The entrances are decorated with bronze bas-reliefs with a main theme of bells, the symbol of the Bell Telephone Company (image). A neo-Romanesque vaulted arcade with ceiling murals runs the whole length of the Vesey Street side.

New Yorker Hotel

architect	Sugarman & Berger
location	481 Eighth Ave., bet. W34 and W35.
date	1930
style	Art Deco
construction	three-storey limestone base, a set-back tower of brown brick
type	Hotel

The 43-story New Yorker Hotel was built in 1929 and opened its doors on January 2, 1930. Much like its contemporaries, the Empire State Building (opened in 1931) and the Chrysler Building (opened in 1930), the New Yorker is designed in the Art Deco style that was popular in the 1920s and 1930s. The building's pyramidal, set-back tower structure largely resembles that of the Empire State Building, which lies just a couple blocks due east on 34th Street. For many years, the New Yorker Hotel was New York's largest hotel.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s the hotel hosted a number of popular Big Bands while notable figures such as Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford and even Fidel Castro stayed here. The inventor Nikola Tesla spent the last ten years of his life in near-seclusion in Suite 3327 (where he also died), largely devoting his time to feeding pigeons while occasionally meeting dignitaries. However, by the late 1960s, with both the passing of the Big Band era as well as the construction of more modern hotels, the hotel slowly lost profitability and closed its doors in April 1972.

Chanin Building

architect	Sloan & Robertson (René Chambellan and Jacques L. Delamarre for the lobby and the ornementation)
location	122 East 42^nd Street (southwest corner of Lexington Avenue)
date	1927-1929
style	Art Deco
construction	Steel frame. 56 floors, 207m (680 feet) high. Cost: $14,000,000 The steel frame is clad in buff brick and terra cotta and it is set back in conformance with the 1916 Zoning Law. The facade illustrates the introduction of colored glass, stone and metal on the exterior of tall buildings. Materials such as bronze, Belgian marble and terra-cotta are used here in an inventive and exuberant way.
type	Office Building

The Chanin Building is a skyscraper located at 122 East 42nd Street in New York City. Built by Irwin S. Chanin in 1929, it is 56 stories high, reaching 197.8 metres excluding the spire (207.3 metres/680 feet including spire). It was designed by Sloan & Robertson in the Art Deco style, [1] and incorporates architectural sculpture by Rene Paul Chambellan. When originally completed, the 50th floor had a silver-and-black high-brow movie theater. This floor and the 51st are now offices joined by a stairwell instead. Initially a dominant landmark in the midtown skyline, the building had an open air observatory on the 54th floor. [2] Having been surpassed in height by a number of buildings, most notably, the Chrysler Building located across the street, the observatory has been long closed.

One Wall Street

architect	Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker
location	One Wall Street, at Broadway
date	1931
style	Art Deco
construction	limestone
type	Bank

In contrast to the American Surety Building, where height is minimized by the subdivision of its facade, the design of the Irving Trust building has an insistent verticality which emphasizes its tall form. This set back skyscraper is modeled as if it was chiselled out of a single piece of stone and it is a good example of the Art Deco style popular in the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s. The building's pointed windows echo the Gothic details of Trinity Church across the street, and its Art Deco interior is one of the finest in New York City.

Majestic Apartments

architect	Jacques Delamarre Like the Century Apartments, the Majestic was developed by Irwin S. Chanin (who was also behind the Chanin Building in Midtown).
location	115 Central Park West
date	1930-1931
style	Art Deco
construction	The base is of limestone, with the upper facade clad in light brown brick. The designer from Chanin's namesake building, René Chambellan, designed the patterned brickwork of the facade. The main mass below the setbacks and towers has columnless corners which form glazed solariums within the corner apartments. The wall on the slightly protruding tower facades extends as piers to the top to form riblike protrusions. On the west side, the wings of the tower have similar, albeit curved, tops of true Art Deco nature.
type	Apartment Building

American Standard (Radiator) Building

architect	Raymond Hood & André Fouilhoux
location	40 West 40th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues, south of Bryant Park)
date	1923-1924
style	Art Deco, neo-gothic
construction	Steel frame, 23 stories, 102.7 m (337 feet) high The black brickwork on the facade was chosen to lessen the visual contrast between the walls and the windows and thus give the tower an effect of solidity and massiveness. The Gothic-style pinnacles and the terra-cotta friezes on the edges of the setbacks are coated with gold. The base is clad in bronze plating and black granite. There are carved allegories, symbolizing the transformation of matter into energy, quite appropriate for a heater company. The entrance lobby is decorated with black marble and mirrors.
type	Office Building