Loews Philadelphia Hotel - Reception

Reception

The design of the PSFS Building elicited both early criticism and praise. In the March 1931 issue of T-Square Club Journal Elbert Conover said, "The day will come when even in America, we will become skillful enough to meet economic pressure without forcing upon the community such ugliness and illogical designing." The PSFS Building was one of only two U.S. skyscrapers included in the 1932 International style exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Run by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, the exhibition was where the term International style was coined. The PSFS Building was praised for its cantilevering facade and the building's organization of shops on the first floor, the banking hall on the second floor, offices above and the service tower in the back. Unlike the PSFS Building, the other skyscraper, New York City's McGraw-Hill Building, design was more due to necessity of publishing operations and zoning restrictions than following an architectural movement. Hitchcock and Johnson were critical of both building's use of ornamental signage at the top. However, Lescaze and Howe's design was not featured at the 1932 Architectural League of New York Annual Exhibition having deemed the skyscraper as having an ugly and illogical design. Howe responded by saying "Like all institutions which have become traditional, it tends to resent change."

In 1939 the building was awarded the Gold Medal by the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects. While the PSFS Building would later influence other buildings, the skyscraper did not start a trend in banking architecture. Spiro Kostof said that the building was "too coolly self-possessed, too intellectual perhaps to start a trend." After the International style became popular in the 1950s, the PSFS Building was called one of the most important skyscrapers built in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Called the United States' first truly modern skyscraper by Architectural Review in 1957, the PSFS Building was awarded Building of the Century by the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1969.

Robert A. M. Stern said of the building, "Nothing like it had been built, and only rarely...had anything near its size been imagined in the vocabularies of either the first or second phase of the International style. PSFS is much more than a superb marriage of function and technological innovation within the constraints of a new vocabulary of form. It is a superbly crafted object, refined in its every detail....PSFS is that rarest of phenomena of our time, a working monument."

William Jordy said the building's uniqueness "appears in its extraordinary ambiguity, as reconciliation, synthesis, and prophecy." Jordy also said, "Although it does epitomize the coming of the European functionalist style of the twenties, this event occurred so late as to make it seem more of a synthesis of previous developments than a herald of new departures. Yet,...as a synthesis, then as an American synthesis, PSFS is worthy of study today...it is rather more innovative than its appearance, date, and provincial position suggest...PSFS is not even quite the unadulterated exemplar of the International style that it seems to be. It depends as well on Beaux-Arts theory, which it ostensibly repudiates."