Buildings Then and Now: Loews Philadelphia Hotel (PSFS Building ...

The PSFS Building today, as the Loews Philadelphia Hotel. Photo courtesy Loews Philadelphia Hotel.

?Marble halls and fantastic domes have been overdone and no longer excite the public?s interest. They have had their day. An era of sound and handsome but 100% practical buildings is at hand.?

So concluded an analysis of bank building design conducted for Philadelphia Saving Fund Society President James M. Wilcox at the start of the Great Depression. Wilcox?s bank, the nation?s oldest savings bank and one of its largest, needed more space to house its growing operations than its neoclassical home on Washington Square provided. Wilcox?s interest in a purely practical headquarters building for his bank, combined with his knowledge of current trends in European architecture, led to the construction of a skyscraper that was a radical departure for American architecture ? a landmark from the day it opened and the harbinger of Modernism in America, or as it came to be known, the ?International Style.?

The PSFS Building in 1962. Until the completion of One Liberty Place in 1987, the only building in the city that was taller was City Hall.

The PSFS Building also marked a break with tradition for its architects, Philadelphians George Howe and William Lescaze. Howe, a partner in the firm of Mellor, Meigs and Howe, was trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition and up until this point had worked firmly in its neoclassical style. In 1929, he left the partnership, bored with the buildings he had been designing, and teamed with Lescaze, a Swiss-born Modernist architect.

From this marriage of architects and client, both seeking to strike out in new directions, came the most influential American skyscraper of the 20th century. The building was revolutionary in every respect while following Louis Sullivan?s dictum, ?Form follows function,? to a T ? literally. Atop the building?s four-story base, which housed shops on the street floor and the main banking hall and offices above, sat a T-shaped office tower rising another 31 stories. The T shape maximized the space available in the office wing by housing all mechanical and service functions in the cross of the T. The office wing in the T?s base in turn emphasized its verticality through the use of light-colored pillars projecting from the exterior wall and maximized light with large horizontal bands of windows that projected beyond the pillars via a cantilevered extension.

The PSFS main banking hall on the second floor. Custom-designed Cartier clocks graced all the building's public spaces. This room is now the Millennium Hall of the Loews Philadelphia Hotel.

The building drew both high praise and sharp criticism on its opening in 1932. Many traditionalists slammed it as ugly and uninspired, and celebrated American architect Frank Lloyd Wright slammed its design as ?neither international nor a style.? Even Wilcox had to be persuaded on the merits of what has come to be its signature element: the large neon sign atop the building that bears the bank?s initials. Even that sign serves a practical purpose, as it hides mechanical equipment on the roof.

The building served as the home of PSFS for 60 years, but by 1992, its best days were seemingly behind it. The bank, by then a subsidiary of a holding company called Meritor Financial Group, had fallen victim to the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s and was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that year. The building was by then 85 percent vacant, and the custom-designed furniture in the offices and 33rd-floor boardrooms had become tattered; the FDIC seized and sold it along with the bank?s other assets.

The 33rd floor boardroom, now the Howe Room. Loews was able to repurchase much of the furniture that had been designed for the boardrooms and auctioned off by the FDIC in 1992.

Enter developer Carl Dranoff, who rode to the building?s rescue. Originally, Dranoff had planned to convert the building to apartments, but noting the Marriott Hotel then rising across Market Street next to the just-opened Pennsylvania Convention Center, he changed plans and opted to convert the building to a hotel. He hired Bower Lewis Thrower Architects to develop a conversion plan, then sold the plan to developer Ronald Rubin, whose Rubin Organization bought the building in 1994 and hired Dranoff to oversee its conversion.

Three years later, Rubin, Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell, and Loews Hotels chairman Jonathan Tisch announced that the PSFS building would become a Loews hotel. Delays stemming from negotiations to buy out Rubin?s interest in the property put off the start of construction by a year, but the hotel was completed in time for it to host delegates attending the 2000 Republican National Convention. In a gesture that won it the goodwill of many, Loews announced that the neon letters spelling out ?PSFS? would remain unaltered atop the building.

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This not-to-scale drawing shows just how radical a departure the PSFS building was from the Art Deco styling of its contemporaries. In a perhaps ironic twist, when Loews remodeled the street floor for use as the hotel's lobby and restaurant, it chose to go with an Art Deco-inspired interior scheme by Daroff Design on the grounds that a purely Modernist interior would feel too cold and impersonal. Image from ning.com.

Addressing the building?s contemporary critics, Wilcox predicted that others ?will see in it beauties they had not suspected.? Time has proven him right, for the initial criticism has since been drowned in an ocean of acclaim. In 1969, the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects named the PSFS building its Building of the Century, and the skyscraper was named a National Historic Landmark in 1976. Architect 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.?

A brochure promoting the building to prospective tenants in 1932 declared that there was ?nothing more modern.? Today, 70 years after its opening, the statement remains true.

-By Sandy Smith for PhiladelphiaRealEstate.com

Unless otherwise noted, historic photos from Historic American Buildings Survey, National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons

Source: http://blog.philadelphiarealestate.com/buildings-then-and-now-loews-philadelphia-hotel-psfs-building/

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