The Hamilton Building is a historic office building in
downtown
''Downtown'' is a term primarily used in American and Canadian English to refer to a city's sometimes commercial, cultural and often the historical, political, and geographic heart. It is often synonymous with its central business district ( ...
Portland, Oregon
Portland ( ) is the List of cities in Oregon, most populous city in the U.S. state of Oregon, located in the Pacific Northwest region. Situated close to northwest Oregon at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, ...
. It went through a renovation in 1977,
[King, Bart: ''An Architectural Guidebook to Portland'', p. 149. Gibbs Smith, 2001] and was listed on
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...
in March of that year.
It is the neighbor of the
Dekum Building
The Dekum or the Dekum Building is a historic office building in downtown Portland, Oregon, United States. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
With its rusticated sandstone base, over-scaled arches at street leve ...
, a fellow NRHP listing on Third Avenue.
The building, completed in 1893, is an anomaly among its contemporaries. While many buildings built during the late 19th century were often ornate, the Hamilton building has little decoration. It is said that architects
Whidden & Lewis
Whidden & Lewis was an architectural firm based in Portland, Oregon, in the United States, around the beginning of the 20th century, formed by William M. Whidden and Ion Lewis. The partnership was established in 1889. Their residential building ...
designed a ground-breaking building, built decades ahead of later (and similar) trends in commercial architecture. Decoration comes in the form of
granite
Granite ( ) is a coarse-grained (phanerite, phaneritic) intrusive rock, intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly coo ...
-clad cast iron entry columns and cable mouldings, set against a Japanese-brick facade.
The Hamilton Building is 6 stories tall, and is named after Hamilton Corbett, son of
Henry W. Corbett. It is also the first building in Portland designed in the
Classical Revival
Neoclassicism, also spelled Neo-classicism, emerged as a Western cultural movement in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that drew inspiration from the art and culture of classical antiquity. Neoclassic ...
style.
See also
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Architecture of Portland, Oregon
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings ...
*
References
External links
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{{Portal bar, Architecture, National Register of Historic Places, Oregon
National Register of Historic Places in Portland, Oregon
1893 establishments in Oregon
Office buildings completed in 1893
Buildings designated early commercial in the National Register of Historic Places
Buildings and structures in Southwest Portland, Oregon
Office buildings on the National Register of Historic Places