The Bradbury Building: A Vision From the Other Side

You would not expect this building from the outside. The facade on Broadway is modest: a five-story Romanesque commercial front in brick, ordinary for its era, the kind of thing that lines the streets of every late-nineteenth-century American city. Then you walk through the entrance doors.

The interior of the Bradbury Building, completed in eighteen ninety-four, is one of the most extraordinary architectural spaces in the United States. A central atrium rises the full height of the building, capped by a skylight of ornamental glazed iron. Open galleries run along both sides on every floor, connected by staircases with elaborately detailed wrought-iron railings. The floor tiles, the brick, the ironwork, the light coming down through the glass, all of it in a kind of obsessive dialogue with itself.

Mining millionaire Lewis Bradbury commissioned the building. The design story, according to architectural histories, is genuinely unusual. Bradbury was dissatisfied with the initial plans from the supervising architect Sumner Hunt. A draftsman without formal architectural training came to Bradbury with a different set of plans. According to the account in those sources, this draftsman told Bradbury the design had been communicated through spiritualist contact with his deceased brother, who had been a practicing architect. Bradbury accepted the design. The building is the result. Architectural historians note this attribution requires verification against primary records; we are reporting it as historians have described it.

Blade Runner was filmed here. So was Chinatown. The light in the afternoon through that skylight is still doing what it was designed to do.