The PPL Building: A Sculpted Mountain Downtown
Near Allentown, Pennsylvania
When the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company decided to build its headquarters in the nineteen twenties, it did not build a box. It built a mountain, or at least that is what its architect intended.
Harvey Wiley Corbett designed the PPL Building between nineteen twenty-six and nineteen twenty-eight, and he described his philosophy as sculpting a building the way a sculptor attacks stone, carving back from the mass, letting the form reveal itself through subtraction rather than addition. The result was a twenty-four-story Art Deco tower that rises from a broad base through a series of setbacks, each floor slightly smaller than the one below it, the whole thing stepping upward like a limestone butte. It stands three hundred and twenty-two feet tall, and in Allentown it is visible from a long way off.
The building went up fast. More than five thousand seven hundred tons of steel, over two and a half million bricks, forty-two miles of interior piping. It was completed and opened on July sixteenth, nineteen twenty-eight. In nineteen thirty, the Encyclopedia Britannica named it the best example of a modern office building in the United States. It was also said to have the world's fastest elevator.
Corbett's assistant on the project was a young architect named Wallace Harrison, who would later design Lincoln Center, LaGuardia Airport, and the United Nations headquarters building in New York. The PPL Tower was an early step in a remarkable career.
The exterior carries sculptural bas-reliefs by Alexander Archipenko, a Ukrainian sculptor and contemporary of Picasso who had studied in Paris and embraced Cubism. His panels around the building's base feature abstract fish and gear wheels representing hydroelectric power, along with bird and animal forms drawn from Ukrainian folk tales. The combination of Corbett's stepped massing, Harrison's supervision, and Archipenko's sculpture makes this building one of the more remarkable examples of Art Deco architecture anywhere in Pennsylvania.
It remains the tallest building in Allentown. On a clear day, its stepped crown is visible from the interstate.
