America's Favorite Architecture

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Photo: Thomas A. Heinz/Corbis

Crane Library, one of Richardson’s most celebrated projects, is also among his simplest and smallest public buildings. The library proves that even the bold, masculine Richardsonian Romanesque style can seem quiet and contemplative. The interior features a stained glass window by artist John LaFarge, and the library's grounds were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.

Architects John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings met as draftsmen in the office of McKim, Mead & White and later formed their own partnership. New York Public is one of their finest buildings and one of the country’s great Beaux-Arts libraries. Carrère was tragically killed in a traffic accident shortly before the library was completed. He was a member of the AIA board of directors at the time.

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photo: Dave G. House/Corbis

Walter Netsch’s original design for the Cadet Chapel drew such criticism from Congress that the Air Force told SOM to go back to the drawing board. Today, Netsch’s Cadet Chapel, with its 17 spires resembling a squadron of fighter jets shooting into the air, has made the campus one of Colorado’s busiest tourist attraction. The chapel received the AIA’s Twenty-five Year Award in 1996.

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photo: R. Wehkam/Skidmore, Owings & Merril

The Mauna Kea Beach Hotel is a fine but lesser known work by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. When the building received an AIA Honor Award in 1967, the jury noted its “restrained detailing and fine spatial sequences.” The hotel is currently closed because of damage sustained during a recent earthquake.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. (an honorary member of the AIA) developed Rockefeller Center between 1929 and 1940. The principal architect for the project was Raymond Hood. The buildings in the complex are Art Deco in style, some of which have made the list of 150 independently. Many people consider Rockefeller Center one of the 20th century’s most successful urban complexes.

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photo: G. E. Kidder Smith/Corbis

Another fine example of Richardson’s signature style, Richardsonian Romanesque, the building’s facade is made of Milford granite, random ashlar, and dark reddish brown brownstone trim. The fireplace in the reading room was designed by architect Stanford White.

The Quadracci Pavilion of the Milwaukee Museum of Art is the first building of famed Spanish architect, artist, and sculptor Santiago Calatrava to be built in the United States. The structure is made up of dramatic shapes of concrete and steel, a 110-ton moveable winged roof, and a unique cable-stayed bridge. Built on the edge of Lake Michigan, the elegant structure suggests images of boats and birds. Calatrava received the AIA’s Gold Medal in 2005.

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photo: Greg Hursley

E. Fay Jones’s Thorncrown Chapel sits on eight acres of woodlands in the Ozark Mountains. The small, cross-braced, pine chapel has 425 windows, made of 6,000 square feet of glass. The pattern of light as it filters through the woods and into the building is constantly changing. Jones was awarded the AIA Gold Medal in 1990, and the chapel received the AIA’s Twenty-five Year Award in 2006.

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith

 

The  main façade of 333 Wacker Drive arcs to follow the contours of the Chicago River. The building’s green-glass curtain wall reflects the water, sky, and neighboring buildings in surprising and dynamic ways. It has been called Chicago’s first Postmodern skyscraper, an appellation its designers reject.

The Gamble House, by brothers Charles and Henry Greene, is one of the high watermarks of the American Arts and Crafts movement. The design is partly inspired by the wood-building vernacular traditions. Wide terraces and sleeping porches facilitate indoor-outdoor living. The Greenes designed every inch of the house and all of its contents, including the furniture, carpets, silverware, and linens.

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photo: Philip Gould/Corbis

Bertram Goodhue’s Nebraska State Capitol was seen as a fresh interpretation of American civic architecture. The innovative tone was set by the competition itself, written by then-AIA president Thomas R. Kimball, which did not define a plan, a style, or a material for the project. Clad in Indiana limestone, the building is an integration of both Art Deco and Neoclassical styles.

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photo:  Tim Hursley/VCBO Architecture

Moshe Safdie’s Salt Lake City Public Library is a dramatic Modern building that recognizes the continuing civic importance of the library in new and compelling ways. A glass-covered, curved walkway borders the stacks. Opposite the stacks are remote reading areas, accessible by bridges, with views of the Wasatch Mountains. The building won an AIA Honor Award in 2004 and an AIA/ALA Library Building Award in 2005.

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photo: Nik Wheeler/Corbis

The Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin are companion hotels designed by Michael Graves (2001 Gold Medalist) in association with Alan Lapidus. The Dolphin is pyramid-shaped and topped with 63-foot-tall dolphins. The Swan is rectangular and topped with 47-foot-high swans. These whimsical buildings are considered Postmodern, a movement and style closely associated with Graves.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

The Guggenheim is considered the last of Wright’s masterworks. The museum’s ramp, around which the galleries are organized, makes five complete turns from top to bottom. The building is flooded with light through a large glass dome.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

One of the city’s first steel-framed buildings, the hotel was billed as Washington’s first skyscraper. The structure is clad in limestone, light-colored brick, and terra-cotta. Located near the White House, it has figured significantly in the political life of the nation. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his “I Have a Dream” speech there.

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photo:  Carol M. Highsmith

Sever Hall is the fifth building on the survey designed by the great 19th-century architect H. H. Richardson. (The others are Trinity Church,  Allegheny County Courthouse, Crane Library, and Ames Library.) In this building, Richardson inflects his signature Romanesque style with new Queen Anne Revivalism. The brick building fits well with other contemporaneously planned buildings on the Harvard campus.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

The New York architecture firm of Warren & Wetmore (Grand Central Station) designed the Broadmoor, one of the finest luxury hotels of its time in the western United States. The Italian Renaissance building is nestled in a dramatic site along a mountain lake in the Rockies. Italian artisans were brought in to work on the hotel’s molded plaster ceilings. Murals and other decorative elements depict images of classical mythology and the Colorado landscape.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

The Ronald Reagan Building, by architect James Freed of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, is the country’s second largest federal building (only the Pentagon is larger). It has a classical façade of Indiana limestone but is Modern in many other ways. Its interior spaces are beautifully lit by a huge, cone-shaped skylight. The complex has many successful public spaces, particularly its asymmetrical outdoor plaza and sculpture garden.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

The AIA has honored the work of perhaps no other architect more than that of Louis Kahn (1971 Gold Medalist). The Phillips Exeter Academy Library, however, is the only Kahn building that made the public’s list. The client specified the use of “Exeter brick,” stone, and slate. Kahn also incorporated wood, particularly white oak. The library received the AIA’s Twenty-five Year Award in 1997.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, an architect associated with luxury hotels and apartment buildings of the Gilded Age, designed the Plaza Hotel in the style of French Renaissance châteaux. His design featured a two-story ballroom and a tearoom with a Tiffany glass-domed ceiling. Upon its opening, New York newspapers heralded it as the “greatest hotel in the world.” New York City's Landmark Commission awarded the structure landmark status in 1969.

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photo:  Carol M. Highsmith

The Sofitel Chicago Water Tower is the exciting design of French architect Jean-Paul Viguier. At its southern end, the tower’s knifelike edge narrows and juts out as it rises, extending at the top 33 feet over the sidewalk. The Chicago chapter of the AIA declared the structure the "best new building in Chicago in the last ten years."

 

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith

The Glessner House is the sixth building (and only residence) in the survey designed by H. H. Richardson. (The others are Trinity Church,  Allegheny County Courthouse, Crane Library, Ames Library, and Sever Hall.) In the house’s primary façade, Richardson blends his signature Romanesque style with an American Colonial style. The building is constructed of a pink-gray granite with a terra-cotta roof.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

The original three-tiered structure, known as the “house that Ruth built,” was the first baseball park to be labeled a "stadium" rather than a "park" or "grounds.”. The structure was torn down in 1973 and replaced with a new one designed by Praeger-Kavanaugh-Waterbury. A third Yankee Stadium, designed by HOK, is under construction now.

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photo:  Carol M. Highsmith

This monumental building, occupying an entire city block, recalls the great neoclassical libraries of the 19th century. Classical details adorn a brick and granite block. The façade along Plymouth St., however, is made of a modern glass curtain wall. The grandest interior space is the skylit winter garden on the top floor.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Lincoln Center is the largest performing arts complex in the word, housing 12 different arts organizations. Many architects have contributed buildings to the complex: Wallace K. Harrison, Metropolitan Opera House; Max Abramovitz, Avery Fisher Hall; Philip Johnson, New York State Theater; Pietro Belluschi, Juilliard School and Alice Tully Hall; and Eero Saarinen, Vivian Beaumont Theater.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

The Dakota was New York City’s first large, luxury apartment building. The 10-story building, designed in the French Renaissance style, with a heavy nod to German Gothic, featured many unique amenities for its time, including an independent power plant, a gymnasium, playrooms, and wine cellars. It remains a very prestigious address, particularly for those people in the arts and entertainment.

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith

The Boston architecture firm Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge inherited H. H. Richardson’s practice and completed many of his buildings. For the Art Institute commission, the firm abandoned Richardson’s Romanesque style in favor of the Classical Revival. Before becoming a permanent museum, the building hosted the scholarly conferences of the World’s Columbian Exposition. The AIA and Daniel Burnham convened the World’s Congress of Architects there in August 1893.

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith
 

The Fairmont had just opened in 1906 when the San Francisco earthquake hit. The hotel was one of the few in its neighborhood to survive the disaster, but it was badly damaged by fire. Julia Morgan  was hired to rebuild the hotel when the original architect hired to do the work, Stanford White, was murdered.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Partly on the strength of his Boston social connections, Charles McKim of McKim, Mead & White won the commission for the original Boston Public Library. The elaborately detailed Renaissance Revival building marked a distinct change in the direction of American architecture. Philip Johnson designed a Modern addition to the library in the 1970s. The newer building shares the same proportions and light-colored granite as the original but is as sparse as the original is detailed.

The Hollywood Bowl was originally a natural amphitheater. The first person to be employed to design a shell for the stage in order to help broadcast the sound was Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1931 Lloyd Wright’s wooden shell was replaced with a concrete one designed by Allied Architects of Los Angeles. That shell was in turn replaced by one designed by Frank Gehry in 1982.  The fifth and latest dome (2004) is the design of Hodgetts + Fung Design Associates.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Architect Elijah Myers also designed the Michigan and Colorado Capitols. The building’s style is Renaissance Revival, and the exterior is "sunset red" granite quarried just 50 miles from the site. Measured by gross square footage, it is the largest state capitol in the country.

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith

The Fontainebleau is one of several Miami Beach hotels designed by noted architect Morris Lapidus. The style has come to be known as Miami Modern, but Lapidus was famous for rejecting the tenets of Modernism and delivering a visual excess akin to the set of a Hollywood musical.

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photo: Tim Hursley

New York architects Edward York and Philip Sawyer received the commission to design the University of Michigan Law School’s Quadrangle in the early 1920s. The Legal Research Building was one of four Neo-Gothic buildings that York & Sawyer would design for the school. The structure, which looks from the outside like a Gothic cathedral, is still one of the largest freestanding law libraries in the world. In 1982 architect Gunnar Birkerts completed an ingenious underground addition to the library.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

The Getty Center, dramatically sited in the Brentwood Hills of Los Angeles, is not only a museum but also a complex of several arts-related buildings. Some of the structures are built of travertine (16,000 tons of which were imported from Bagni di Tivoli, Italy, for the project), and others are of white or beige enamel plates. Artist Robert Irwin designed the Getty’s 134,000-square-foot Central Garden.

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photo: Floto + Warner/Arcaid/Corbis

The High Museum, built nearly a decade and a half before the Getty Center, is constructed with a concrete frame and clad in enameled steel. In 1991 the AIA cited the building as one of the “ten best works of American architecture of the 1980s.” Italian architect Renzo Piano has just completed a major and much acclaimed addition (2005) to the High Museum.

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith

The Federal Building at Islip is the third consecutive building on the survey by Richard Meier. The steel-framed structure is clad in white-coated aluminum panels. Granite and cherry wood provide elegance on the interior. The public façade is glass and offers views of the Atlantic Ocean.

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photo: Peter Aaron/Esto

The Humana Building by architect Michael Graves (2001 Gold Medalist) has become an icon of the Postmodern movement, composed as it is of idiosyncratic variations on classical forms. The colorful building is set on an eight-story base of pink granite with deep red granite columns along the first few floors. Time magazine named the building one of the 10 best of the 1980s.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Frank Gehry is probably the most famous living American architect. His preliminary design of the Disney Concert Hall actually predates his famous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, but fund-raising and other problems stalled the Disney project for some 10 years. Laid end to end, the folding, billowing stainless steel exterior panels would stretch for 49 miles. The acoustics of the wood-paneled auditorium are superb.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Radio City Music Hall is part of the Rockefeller Center complex. It is one among many examples of New York Art Deco represented in this exhibition. The building was constructed in the depths of the Great Depression and became a symbol of hope. Its grand neon marquee is one of the most famous sites in New York City.

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith

NBBJ designed a striking new stadium for the Cincinnati Bengals of the NFL. The building has a cantilevered, steel-structured roof, clad with translucent fabric. Sight lines are superb, and there are no bad seats. The project received a 2002 Business Week/Architectural Record Design Award.

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photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Helmut Jahn’s exposed-steel-frame terminal feels at once both modern and new but also harkens back to the era of the grand Beaux-Arts train station. This is experiential architecture par excellence, as the project includes a great tunnel whose long, moving walkway winds through a kinetic light and sound sculpture. Murphy/Jahn received the AIA’s Architecture Firm Award in 2005.

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photo: G. E. Kidder Smith/Corbis

John Portman’s Hyatt Regency in Atlanta is 40 years old this year, and it is easy to imagine the stunned and awed reactions of those who first walked into the enormous 22-story, skylit atrium with it’s bank of glass elevators. It was science fiction come alive. Adding to the space-age feel is the revolving restaurant made of blue Plexiglas on top of the building.

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photo: Douglas Peebles

Due to corporate mergers and shifting corporate brands, San Francisco Giants Stadium has had three names in six years. Currently it is the AT&T Park. The structure is dramatically sited right on the Bay, and homerun balls on occasion splash into the water. Most all the seats have beautiful views of the Bay Bridge and the marina.

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photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Time Warner Center, a multiuse facility on New York City’s Columbus Circle, is (at $1.8 billion) one of the most expensive buildings ever constructed in America. The base of the towers reflects the curve of Columbus Circle in a graceful arc. It is a geometrically complex building with obtuse and acute angles that make the towers look dynamic and slender.

Chicago architect Harry Weese is largely responsible for the design of the D.C. Metro stations. The coffered-concrete, barrel-vault design has proved popular with critics and the public alike. The stations are lit with indirect lighting, creating a dramatic pattern of light and shadow.

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The IDS Center is the second of three projects in the exhibition by architect Philip Johnson (1978 Gold Medalist). The center comprises four buildings, one of which is the tallest building in Minneapolis. The Center’s piazza, known as Crystal Court, is covered by a pyramidal structure of glass and plastic and is one of the city’s marquee public spaces.

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photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Acclaimed Swiss architect Mario Botta designed the SFMOMA, which at 225,000-square-feet is the largest venue in the western United States for the exhibition of modern art. Brick-clad with zebra bands of granite, the structure recalls Moorish architecture and the Romanesque buildings of Botta’s native region of Ticino, Switzerland.

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith

Union Station in Chicago was built by Daniel Burnham’s successor firm Graham, Anderson, Probst & White after Burnham’s death. The station was a major element in the West Loop development as laid out in the 1909 Plan of Chicago. The station's ornate Beaux-Arts main waiting room, with its vaulted skylight, statuary, and connecting lobbies, staircases, and balconies, is one of Chicago’s great public spaces.

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith

Appropriately enough, a team of architects from all over the world designed the U.N. Headquarters. The scheme is primarily associated with French architect Le Corbusier with significant contributions from Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer and American Wallace K. Harrison. The 39-story Secretariat building, only 72-feet wide, was controversial in its day but has become a Modernist landmark.

The Pension Building (now the National Building Museum) was designed by Montgomery C. Meigs who served as quartermaster general during the Civil War. The building is of red brick with a three-foot-tall terra cotta sculptural band between the first and second floor depicting Civil War military scenes. The building’s Great Hall (an early version of an atrium) is an extraordinary space, and has been the site of many a presidential inaugural ball.

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith

Fenway Park was designed by the same firm that designed Yankee Stadium, the Osborn Engineering Company. The park’s peculiar size and shape were determined by the surrounding city streets. The 37-foot-tall left field wall, known as the “Green Monster,” compensates for the short depth of left field.

 

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photo: Doug Carr/Dana-Thomas House

Wright found rooms in Victorian-era homes boxy and confining. The solution was his so-called Prairie-style house, marked by low horizontal lines and open interior spaces. The Dana-Thomas House is a fine example of this stylistic innovation. The home, designed for a wealthy client, contained a two-story living room, a library, an art gallery, and a bowling alley in the basement.

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith

Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal captures the modern drama of air traveling, despite the fact that the design predates the widespread commercial use of jets. Although made of concrete, the structure conveys a sense of lightness and airiness. Seen from a distance, the curves of the vaulted structure look like a bird extending its wings.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

The Athenaeum sits on the banks of the Wabash river.  As in some of Meier’s other works, the façade is clad in square, white, porcelain, steel-backed panels.  Some critics have noted a resemblance to Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye.  The Athenaeum received at AIA Honor Award in 1982.

The Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron is responsible for the spectacular new addition to the Walker Art Center. (The original building was designed by 2007 Gold Medalist Edward Larrabee Barnes.) The most dramatic element to the new addition is a chunky, five-story building clad in crumpled aluminum that some have likened to a large block of ice.

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photo:  Reuters/Corbis

Although the massive arches on the brick, limestone, and granite exterior of the American Airlines Center harken back to the era of the big-city train terminal, they belie the high-tech, state-of-the-art interior of this sports and entertainment complex. Built on a former brownfield site, the center was meant to signal the revitalization of the city’s Victory Park neighborhood. 

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photo:  Carol M. Highsmith

Albert Chase McArthur studied with Frank Lloyd Wright between 1907 and 1909, and indeed Wright’s influence on the Biltmore’s design is palpable. McArthur, in fact, used the textile-block system that Wright had developed in southern California. The precast concrete blocks were molded on site and used throughout the resort.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

The arched brick facade, asymmetrical playing field, and natural turf of Camden Yards harken back to America’s perenniallly favorite ball parks from the early 20th century, such as Fenway and Ebbets Field. Integrated into the complex is the large, turn-of-the-century B&O Railroad warehouse, which contains offices for the Orioles staff.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

In 1937 Wright bought 600 acres in the Sonoran Desert at the foot of McDowell Mountain. He built there first a camp and then gradually an entire complex of offices, drafting rooms, and living quarters. All the while, Taliesin West served as a laboratory for Wright’s ideas and was constructed almost entirely by the architecture students who studied there. The walls are of concrete poured around large desert stones.

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Photo: Carol M. Highsmith

James Ingo Freed was chosen as the architect of the Holocaust Museum after the initial design of Notter, Feingold and Alexander was rejected by DC’s Fine Arts Commission. The classical façades of concrete and brick blend well with the neo-classical federal buildings surrounding the museum. Inside, however, the design takes on asymmetrical and jarring qualities, reflecting the disturbing and difficult content of the museum.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Citicorp Center is the most famous work of noted American architect Hugh Stubbins. The top of the tower slopes 45 degrees and was going to be fitted with solar panels but never was. The aluminum and glass building has a sun-filled, multi-story atrium. The building won an AIA Honor Award in 1978, and Hugh Stubbins and Associates won the Architecture Firm Award in 1967.

 

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith

Like the Wright’s Guggenheim Museum (#74), the V.C. Morris Gift Shop has as its central interior element a spiral ramp.  On its brick exterior the building features a Romanesque portal arch.  The curve of the arch is echoed throughout the interior detailing.  The structure is one of 17 by Wright that the AIA has deemed essential for preservation.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Union Station, designed by Chicago architect Javis Hunt, is the most prominent architectural landmark of the City Beautiful movement in Kansas City.  At 850,000 square feet, it was, at its completion, the country’s third largest terminal.  In 1933, gang members gunned down four unarmed FBI agents in the building in what would be come to be known as the “Kansas City Massacre.”

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Marvelously preserved, the Rookery is one of Burnham and Root’s last surviving commercial buildings in Chicago. The square building was designed around a central court surmounted by a skylight above the second story. Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to remodel the ground-floor lobby in 1905. In the 1940s the light court was covered with tar paper and paint, leaving the lobby dark until the late 1980s, when it was restored to its original grandeur.

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith

The Douglas House on the shores of Lake Michigan is one of several spectacular residences Richard Meier completed early in his career and that helped to solidify his reputation.  The whiteness and pure geometry of the house stand in sharp contrast to the pine trees that surround it.  The openness of the plan and the glass elevations ensure dramatic lake and shoreline views throughout.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, designed for the heiress and progressive thinker Aline Barnsdall, is one of the world’s most famous residences. Although the exterior walls appear to be of concrete, they are actually made of hollow clay tiles covered in stucco. The structure reflects Wright’s interest in pre-Columbian, particularly Mayan, architecture.

 

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photo: Richard Payne, FAIA

The two trapezoidal-shaped towers of Pennzoil Place are separated only by 10 feet, creating a distinct, 500-foot-tall sliver of light on the Houston skyline. The towers are connected at street level by a dramatic, glass-enclosed galleria.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

The Astrodome, originally called Harris County Domed Stadium, was completed in 1965.  It was the first baseball stadium to be cover by a roof.  The dome was initially made of semitransparent panels that allowed in enough sun light for grass to grow on the field.  However, the panels had to be painted and artificial turf installed when it was discovered that fly balls were difficult to see against the dome. 

 

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photo: Balthazar Korab Ltd.

The first Corning Museum, designed by Wallace Harrison of Harrison & Abramowitz, was an elegant, glass-walled building that opened in 1951.  In 1978 architect Gunnar Birkerts completed a new addition, which included a series of galleries with a library at their core.  The most recent addition of a new visitors’ center and a sculpture gallery was completed by the firm Smith-Miller + Hawkinson in 2001.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

30th Street Station was designed and built at the height of the Great Depression by Daniel Burnham’s successor firm, Graham Anderson Probst and White.  The eight-story, concrete-frame building represented a departure from the Beaux-Arts to a more modernized style.  The designers included several elements that were new to train stations at the time including a chapel, a mortuary, a hospital, and a pneumatic tube network for internal communication.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Wright’s Robie House is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest buildings of the 20th century. Built for bicycle manufacturer Frederick Robie, it is one of Wright’s last and perhaps best Prairie Style houses. Brick piers and steel beams make up the framework upon which the building’s three tiers sit. The horizontality of the house is reinforced by the use of long, narrow bricks in the façade and the deep overhangs of its low-slung roof.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

Williams Tower is a highly visible building. At the time of its construction it was the tallest building in America outside of a downtown business district. The design suggests the stripped-down classicism of Bertram Goodhue’s Nebraska State Capitol.

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Apple SoHo is the computer company’s 32^nd retail store and, at the time of its construction, the largest.  The building reflects Steve Jobs’ vision to open modern, chic retail buildings.  Apple SoHo is an adaptive reuse of a neoclassical post office from the 1920s.  It is the interior, however, that dazzles and surprises, while it draws on a standardized assemblage of parts that are used throughout the Apple retail chain.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith

The design of Hancock Towers is largely that of I.M Pei’s partner Henry Cobb.  Although the building had a troubled construction history (dozens of window units cracked and some fell out during a winter storm), it is now considered one of the great skyscrapers of the late-modern period.  Off-center grooves make the building’s facades distinctive; and the structure provides an elegant mirror for H. H. Richardson’s Trinity Church.

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Photo: Bettmann/Corbis

The architecture firm of McKim, Mead and White designed Penn Station. Like many of the larger train terminals of this period, the building was modeled partly on the Roman bath complex. Baths were one of the few structures from the ancient world that accommodated large flows of people, an obvious requirement of the modern train terminal. There is almost nothing left of the original structure. 

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith

 

Louis Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott is one of the first department stores to be built using steel frame construction. The new technology allowed for more open and more light-filled retail spaces. Sullivan’s signature detailing of geometric and botanical forms in cast iron covers the display windows at sidewalk level.

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 photo:  Carol M. Highsmith

The Auditorium Building is one or two structures on the list of the public’s 150 favorites by renowned American architect Louis Sullivan. (The other is Carson Pirie Scott.) It was this commission that established his international reputation and that of his partner Dankmar Adler. Originally an arts and commercial complex, the granite and limestone building is considered an important precursor to the Modern movement. 

 

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photo: Carol M. Highsmith

Eero Saarinen designed Yale University’s Ingalls Ice Arena in the late 1950s. Saarinen was an alumnus of Yale and had a great patron in then-university president A. Whitney Griswold. Critical reception of the building was initially negative. The press dubbed it the “Yale Whale,” a moniker that is now generally used affectionately. 

In 1885, the trade journal American Architect & Building News polled architects to determine the best buildings in the United States.  Here is what they found:

1. H.H. Richardson: Trinity Church, Boston, 1872-77.
2. Various architects: The U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C.
3. Richard Morris Hunt: Vanderbilt House, New York City,
4. Richard Upjohn: Trinity Church, New York City, 1846.
5. Frederick Withers & Calvert Vaux: the Jefferson Market Courthouse, New York City, 1875-77.
6. Richard Upjohn: Connecticut State Capitol, Hartford, 1873-79.
7. H.H. Richardson: City Hall, Albany, New York, 1880-83.
8. H.H. Richardson: Sever Hall, Harvard University, 1878-80.
9. H.H. Richardson: New York State Capitol, Albany, (Richardson was one of four architects), 1875-86.
10. H.H. Richardson: Town Hall, North Easton, MA, 1879-1881
    
    

H. H. Richardson held five of the top ten spots in 1885.  He holds six of the top hundred spots in the current survey.  Richard Upjohn (founding president of the American Institute of Architects) had two buildings in the top ten in 1885.  He has no buildings in today's survey.

The people have spoken. The poll is closed. Now it’s your turn to react. Use this space to comment on America's Favorite Architecture.  What has the public missed?  Where did they surprise you? And what do you think was on their minds? Also feel free to add comments on individual choices—each has its own blog. We want to make sure we give every one of our top 150 landmarks the recognition they deserve.  Make a point, share some facts, or start a discussion.  We value your input.