M&T Bank Amherst Center (former Sylvania Electric Products Amherst Engineering Laboratories), Amherst, New York, November 2019 : 無料・フリー素材/写真
M&T Bank Amherst Center (former Sylvania Electric Products Amherst Engineering Laboratories), Amherst, New York, November 2019 / Western New York Architecture Deep Cuts
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示-継承 2.1 |
|---|---|
| 説明 | M&T Bank Amherst Center, 1100 Wehrle Drive at Cayuga Road, Amherst, New York. Built in 1958 to a design by architect and civil engineer Jacob Fruchtbaum, this two-story steel-reinforced masonry structure is a paragon of the then-popular International Style with its low-slung dimensions, characteristic horizontal ribbons of windows, smooth surfaces, preponderance of straight lines and right angles, and almost complete lack of exterior ornamentation. The building was originally constructed for the Sylvania Electric Products Company, which traces its roots to the town of Emporium, Pennsylvania, where it was chartered in 1924 as a manufacturer and seller of radio tubes. Then known as the Sylvania Product Company, it shared factory space with the Nilco Lamp Works, and in 1931, those two businesses along with the Hygrade Lamp Company of Salem, Massachusetts merged operations into what was originally known as the Hygrade Sylvania Company, headquartered in Salem and later renamed Sylvania Electric Products. Diversifying throughout the remainder of the decade and into the next, the company distinguished itself through the development of the first tubular fluorescent lamp, innovations in the field of vacuum tubes and transistors, and early incursions into television technology. It was the latter of these that initially was most relevant to Sylvania's Buffalo-area presence, which began with their 1944 purchase of the Colonial Radio and Television Company, which they operated initially as a wholly-owned subsidiary and later as part of their own Radio and Television Division. However, by the time construction of the building seen here was first envisioned in 1955, the nature of their local operations had changed: they were in the midst of selling the Rano Street manufacturing plant that had formerly been home to Colonial Radio, and meanwhile the space they had begun leasing two years prior in part of the former Buffalo Gasoline Motor Company plant on Great Arrow Avenue was quickly becoming too small to accommodate the company's newly launched Electronics Systems Division. Hence this 100,000-square-foot, $2 million facility, at the time the largest industrial development project the Town of Amherst had ever seen, which would serve as a research and engineering laboratory used for what the Buffalo Evening News described as "highly specialized, top-secret research and engineering, presumably in the field of national defense" (it's to be noted that the primary output of the Great Arrow plant was electronic subsystems used in the B-58 Hustler, the U.S. Air Force's first supersonic bomber). The height of modernity in its time, the lab was "air-conditioned, acoustically treated, and equipped with the most modern electronic test equipment", and additionally envisioned as merely the opening salvo of yet another massive expansion of Sylvania's Buffalo-area operations. Ground was broken in April 1957, and indeed, by the time the building was dedicated in May of the following year, plans were already underway to enlarge it. (It was in 1960 when the annex was completed on the west side of the property, which by then housed a total of three laboratories, including those of the Advanced Communications Systems and Product Engineering units, employing some 800 workers in all. By this time, Sylvania had become a division of parent company General Telephone & Electronics.) The Amherst Laboratories would go on to a crucial role in developing electronic systems for the Air Force's Minuteman missile program. However, after development of those was completed, Sylvania's contract with the military lapsed and, now with a surplus of space, they sold the building in 1970 to the Manufacturers & Traders Trust Company of Buffalo, who used their newly rechristened Amherst Center to house the offices of several divisions, most notably the Consumer Banking Department. M&T still owns the building today. Sylvania, for its part, afterward consolidated its local operations in their Great Arrow Avenue facility, which itself closed in 1972, due again to the "continual decline in defense spending associated with the product line manufactured at Buffalo." |
| 撮影日 | 2019-11-21 13:30:25 |
| 撮影者 | Western New York Architecture Deep Cuts |
| 撮影地 | |
| カメラ | iPhone 6s Plus , Apple |
| 露出 | 0.002 sec (1/411) |
| 開放F値 | f/2.2 |