Zeckendorf Plaza
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Adams Mark Hotel (Zeckendorf Plaza)
1958–1960, I. M. Pei and Partners. 350 16th St. (Court Pl. between 15th and 16th sts.)
Winner of a 1959 National AIA Honor Award, this two-block complex for developer William Zeckendorf includes a twenty-two-story hotel, a department store, and a three-level underground parking garage. The hotel, a narrow slab building, has a skin of ruddy exposed precast aggregate panels, pierced on east and west sides by grid windows. Sand and gravel for the aggregate came from the excavation itself. The four-story department store next door, connected to the hotel by both a sky bridge and an underground corridor, is a cube 266 feet on a side with an anodized aluminum grid curtain facade. A hyperbolic paraboloid pavilion with glass curtain walls fronts the 16th Street Pedestrian Mall. In 1996 the paraboloid was demolished and the department store partially gutted to expand the hotel.
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