Rohm and Haas Corporate Headquarters - Building

Building

Starting from George M. Ewing's original design of an office tower, Pietro Belluschi and George M. Ewing Co. turned the Rohm and Haas Corporate Headquarters into a 300,000-square-foot (28,000 m2), nine-story low horizontal block. At the corner of 6th Street and Market Street, two blocks away from Independence Hall, the Rohm and Haas Corporate Headquarters front facade runs parallel along 6th Street looking towards the Independence Mall. The reinforced concrete framed building sits on flaring concrete columns and is set back from the street by a raised plaza. The landscaped plaza cuts through the middle of the ground level of the building, opening up to a larger plaza with a fountain and small pool. The plaza behind the building allows public access to an alley that leads to Seventh Street.

To help keep the building cool, Belluschi added bronze-colored translucent corrugated panel sunscreens to the facade. Supported by a bronze anodized aluminum lattice, the sunscreens are made of Rohm and Haas's principal product, Plexiglas. The use of sunscreens and dark colors gave the facade a textured pattern and overall effect of avoiding making the building appear oversized. Besides the sunscreens, Plexiglas was used in the board room, in a few of the artistic commissions and light fixtures by designer György Kepes.

The building was very well received by Philadelphia's city planners, who felt it set a standard for redevelopment buildings. The building was designed to contrast, but not overwhelm the nearby 18th-century Georgian architecture. The Washington Post architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt praised the building for its sensitivity to the nearby historic buildings, and how it related to the texture and small size of Independence Hall and at the same time the large open space of Independence Mall. The Corporate Headquarters has also been praised for its logical configuration, the building being described as "a very well done rational office building." Today the Rohm and Haas Corporate Headquarters is considered one of the best examples of the International style.

Read more about this topic:  Rohm And Haas Corporate Headquarters

Famous quotes containing the word building:

    It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.
    Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)

    Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.
    Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)