form and function

"It is a curious, haunting, and distinctive kind of beauty, this palette of black and white, these textures of stainless steel, polished marble, and plate glass, these forms so purely cubistic." So wrote Frederick Gutheim in 1949 in a retrospective look at the 1932 PSFS Building. Considered by most to be the first self-consciously designed International Style office tower, it opened up a period of urban Bauhaus-influenced Modernism. The building was designed by the firm of Howe & Lescaze.

Located at 12th and Market Streets, the PSFS ("Philadelphia Savings Fund Society") Building has outlived the Society and has been converted into a hotel. The simple functionalism of the tower stands in distinction to the traditional design elements of some of its neighbors and stands apart from the glassy form of One Liberty Place in the background. Presciently, Gutheim noted "What has aged [since 1932] is not the building but the style."

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