30 Gorgeous Photos That Might Give You A New Appreciation For “Old American Architecture”

The building, also know as the General Electric Building, is a skyscraper at the southwestern corner of Lexington Avenue and 51st Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The building, designed by Cross & Cross and completed in 1931, was known as the RCA Victor Building during its construction.

It was designed by John Walter Cross of Cross & Cross in the Art Deco style with Gothic Revival ornamentation.

The building is still in use today

“It’s not possible to take such a photograph anymore, as the buildings outside block the sun rays.”

The hotel is situated in Old Quebec, within the historic district's Upper Town, on the southern side of Place d'Armes. The Château Frontenac was designed by Bruce Price, and was built by the Canadian Pacific Railway company. It opened in 1893 and is still in use today

The building was built in 1932 and was headquarters for the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation, what was "then the nation's largest electric utility company"

The mansion was built for Captain Joseph DeLemar. It had a palm court, cave, 70 ft water tower with an elevator leading to a tea house, indoor tennis court, and stained glass windows designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

The 60,000 square foot home included 12 bedrooms, 12 baths, a billiard room, den, dining room, mirrored breakfast room, long party rooms to entertain hundreds of guests. De Lamar enjoyed playing an intricate pipe organ at the base of his stairway. Large windows overlooked exquisite gardens, the private bathing casino and boat landing on the Long Island Sound.

Sadly demolished

The George Peabody Library was funded by George Peabody (1795–1869). Peabody, having become a wealthy man in Baltimore through commerce during the 1810s and 1820s, following his brief service in the state militia defending the city against the famous British attack during the War of 1812, "gave $300,000 as a beginning sum for the Peabody Institute" in February 1857.

The library interior is often regarded as one of the most beautiful libraries in the world. Completed in 1878, it was designed by Baltimore architect Edmund G. Lind in collaboration with the first Peabody provost, Nathaniel H. Morison, that described it as a "cathedral of books". The visually stunning, monumental neo-Greco interior features an atrium that, over an alternating black and white slab marble floor, soars 61 feet high to a latticed skylight of frosted heavy glass, surrounded by five tiers of ornamental black cast-iron balconies (produced locally by the Bartlett-Hayward Company) and gold-scalloped columns containing closely packed book stacks. Between July 2002 and May 2004, the now historic library underwent a $1 million renovation and refurbishment

It was created by the Humboldt Savings Bank, with construction beginning in 1905. However, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed its initial construction phase. A new building was completed in 1908. The building consists granite, marble, and terra cotta tile facing over reinforced concrete and steel

The exposition was an influential social and cultural event and had a profound effect on American architecture, the arts, American industrial optimism, and Chicago's image

The main palace Orangerie was built by Landgrave Charles between 1654 and 1730 as an “exotic winter garden” until the beginning of the Second World War. It serves as an astronomy and physical cabinet today and the marble bath

It was built between 1895 and 1897 as the Geschäftshaus Ilgen by the architects Schilling und Graebner for the businessman Hermann Ilgen.

It was destroyed in bombing raids during WWII

Constructed in 1904 and expanded to its present size in 1912. The hotel is still in use today

William A. Clark, a wealthy entrepreneur and politician from Montana, commissioned the New York City firm of Lord, Hewlett & Hull to build the mansion in 1897. It was completed in 1911, after numerous legal disputes, at a cost of $7 million (equivalent to $203,575,000 in 2021). The mansion contained 121 rooms, 31 baths, four art galleries, a swimming pool, a concealed garage, and a private underground rail line to bring in coal for heat.

In 1925, upon Clark's death, his widow and his daughter, Huguette Clark, moved to 907 Fifth Avenue, where the annual rental for a full-floor apartment was about $30,000. Shortly thereafter, the mansion was sold to Anthony Campagna for $3 million (equivalent to $46,355,000 in 2021). He had the home torn down in 1927, less than 20 years after it was built

It stood on the northwest corner of Wall Street and Nassau Street, on a narrow strip of land measuring 26 by 73 feet (7.9 m × 22.3 m). At the time of its completion in 1897, the Gillender Building was, depending on ranking methods, the fourth- or eighth-tallest structure in New York City.

Demolished in 1910

It was built between 1905 and 1907 and was designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh in the French Renaissance style

It is a Victorian-era structure of two nine-story buildings, joined by a five-story arcade with a glass skylight spanning over 300 feet (91 m), along the four balconies. Erected in 1890, at a cost of $867,000 ($26,100,000 in 2021 dollars), the Arcade opened on Memorial Day (May 30, 1890), and is identified as one of the earliest indoor shopping arcades in the United States.

The building is still in use today

The Alwyn Court was built between 1907 and 1909 and was designed by Harde & Short in the French Renaissance style.

The building is thirteen stories tall. Its facade is clad with elaborate terracotta ornamentation in the Francis I style, with a main entrance on Seventh Avenue and 58th Street. Inside is an octagonal courtyard with a painted facade by artist Richard Haas, as well as a location of the Petrossian caviar bar. The Alwyn Court was originally built with twenty-two elaborately decorated apartments, two on every floor, which typically had fourteen rooms and five bathrooms. The interior was subdivided into 75 apartments in 1938.

The Alwyn Court was named after Alwyn Ball Jr., one of the building's developers. Despite a fire shortly after its opening, the Alwyn Court quickly became one of New York City's most expensive apartment buildings. During the early 20th century, ownership changed several times. By the 1930s, the last luxury tenant had moved out, and the building's interior was completely rebuilt. The Alwyn Court was made a New York City designated landmark in 1966, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. The building was renovated and converted to cooperative apartments in 1980, and the facade was restored in the late 1990s and early 2000s

It was originally built as a residential hotel by William Earle Dodge Stokes, the Phelps-Dodge copper heir and shareholder in the Ansonia Clock Company, and it was named after his grandfather, the industrialist Anson Greene Phelps. In 1897, Stokes commissioned French architect Paul Emile Duboy to design the grandest hotel in Manhattan.

Erected between 1899 and 1904, it was the largest residential hotel of its day and the first air-conditioned hotel in New York. The building has an eighteen-story steel-frame structure. The exterior is decorated in the Beaux-Art style with a Parisian style mansard roof. The Ansonia features round corner-towers or turrets and an open stairwell that sweeps up to a domed skylight.

The Ansonia has had many celebrated residents, including baseball player Babe Ruth; writer Theodore Dreiser, in 1912; the leader of the Bahá'í Faith `Abdu'l-Bahá; Nobel prize winner in literature Isaac Bashevitz Singer; conductor Arturo Toscanini; composer Igor Stravinsky; fashion designer Koos van den Akker; and Italian tenor Enrico Caruso.

In 1992, the Ansonia was converted to a condominium apartment building with 430 apartments. By 2007, most of the rent-controlled apartment tenants had moved out, and the small apartments were sold to buyers who purchased clusters of small apartments and combined them to recreate grand apartments.

The Ansonia is home to part of the New York campus of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy

The building was designed in the Beaux-Arts style by architect Henry Ives Cobb. The floorplan was a six-story Greek cross atop a two-story base with a raised basement.

After construction was complete, more than $2,000,000 remained for interior decoration of the Chicago Federal Building. The four wings met under the dome to form an octagonal rotunda, inspired by Imperial Roman architecture, that was open to the ninth floor. The rotunda's 100 ft (30 m) diameter made it larger than that of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

The building was demolished in 1965 and replaced with the Kluczynski Federal Building

The building with its pyramid shaped roof is prominently featured in the center of photos of the Gateway Arch from the Illinois side as its location on the Memorial Plaza is lined up in the middle directly behind the Old Courthouse.

The building was part of an $87 million bond issue ratified by voters in 1923 to build monumental buildings along the Memorial Plaza which also included Kiel Auditorium and the Municipal Services Building. The Plaza and the buildings were part of St. Louis's City Beautiful plan.

It replaced the Old Courthouse as the city's court building and its construction prompted the descendants of the founding father Auguste Chouteau to unsuccessfully sue the city to get the Old Courthouse back since the stipulation was that it was to always be the courthouse.

The pyramid roof on the top was designed to resemble the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus which was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It features 32 Ionic columns. Each of the columns have 6 fluted drums, and a cap, and are about 42 feet (13 m) high, 5+1⁄2 feet in diameter. They are made of Indiana limestone.

The roof is made of cast aluminum and is topped by two 12-foot (3.7 m) high sphinx-like structures with the fleur-de-lis of St. Louis adorned on the chests. These sphinx-like creatures were sculpted by Cleveland sculptor, Steven A. Rebeck

Designed by New York architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue in 1920, it was constructed of Indiana limestone from 1922 to 1932

Once the tallest building in the world, its Beaux-Arts style, crafted by architect Ernest Flagg, was a testament to the grandeur of the Gilded Age. The building’s red brick and bluestone exterior, adorned with ornate sculptures and capped by a French-inspired mansard roof, made it an iconic part of Manhattan’s skyline. It was demolished in 1968

The building was completed in 1910. This monumental example of highly charged Baroque Revival architecture has an impressive façade above the sea, towering over the sheer cliff face to a height of 279 feet (85.04 m).

It took eleven years to build, using 100,000 tons of stone from La Turbie. During construction, the names of twenty well-known oceanographic research vessels personally selected by Prince Albert I were inscribed into the frieze of the museum's façade

The first Saltair, completed in 1893, was jointly owned by a corporation associated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Salt Lake & Los Angeles Railway, which was constructed for the express purpose of serving the resort. Saltair was not the first resort built on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, but was the most successful ever built. It was designed by well-known Utah architect Richard K.A. Kletting and rested on over 2,000 posts and pilings, many of which remain and still are visible over 110 years later.

Burned in 1925

It was demolished in 1927 and replaced with a luxury apartment building (960 Fifth Avenue).

The house took up 250 feet on 77th Street and 77 feet on Fifth Avenue, more than any other rich man's mansion on Fifth opposite the park, with the exception of Andrew Carnegie's. The Fifth Avenue frontage was large for a New York house, with three bays of granite.

On 77th Street, the house featured a long facade rising to a steep mansard roof. The mansion featured a spectacular four-sided tower with a three-story-high inward-curving arch topped by an open pergola that was said to have been visible from almost anywhere in Central Park

Built by millionaire developer and Standard Oil co-founder Henry M. Flagler and completed in 1888. The hotel was designed in the Spanish Renaissance style as the first major project of the New York architecture firm Carrère & Hastings, which would go on to gain world renown.

The hotel was the first of its kind constructed entirely of poured concrete, using the local coquina stone as aggregate. The hotel was also one of the first buildings in the country wired for electricity from the onset, with the power being supplied by DC generators installed by Flagler's friend, Thomas Edison.

Interior design of the hotel was headed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, and his company, Tiffany & Co, which provided the stained glass windows in the hotel's dining room. The hotel's furnishings were provided by Pottier & Stymus, a prominent New York City furniture and design firm at the time. Bernard Maybeck, whose later designs include the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, served as a draftsman on the project and designed its 540 guest rooms.

The original building and grounds of the hotel are today a part of Flagler College

Construction started in 1859, but the project was not completed until after the Civil War. Destroyed by a fire in 1897