American Institute of Pharmacy (American Pharmacists Association)
- Architects
- John Russell Pope George A. Fuller Company
- Year
- 1932
- Style
- Neoclassical
- City
- Washington, DC
- Collection
- the city beautiful
The American Institute of Pharmacy Building, headquarters of the American Pharmacists Association, sits at 2215 Constitution Avenue, NW, the only privately held lot in an area otherwise surrounded by protected federal land. John Russell Pope designed the late Beaux-Arts building, completed in 1933, on a terrace overlooking the stepped slope down to the Lincoln Memorial.
the building
A marble box on a federal lot. The building is a one-story structure with a full basement partly above grade, framed in steel and brick with reinforced concrete floors and roof, then faced entirely in Vermont marble, a permanent, monumental material for what is otherwise a compact headquarters building.
The entrance surround. A single monumental door, flanked by pilasters and large bronze lamps, is the sole punctuation of the facade. Allegorical relief sculpture by Ulysses Ricci embellishes the entrance, concentrating all of the building's ornament into that one opening.
the style
Pope worked here in a late Beaux-Arts idiom: a strongly centralized mass with subordinate wings to either side, all wrapped in Vermont marble, aimed at institutional gravity rather than domestic warmth.
More on Neoclassicalsignificance
The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977 and is a DC Historic Landmark (#L_0283), one of the few privately owned parcels amid the protected federal land along this stretch of Constitution Avenue.
nearby
- United States Institute of Peace Headquarters
- National Academy of Sciences
- Harry S. Truman Federal Building
- Old Naval Observatory
- Eccles Building
- Lincoln Memorial