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}} Philadelphia City Hall, located at 1 Penn Square, is the seat of government for the city of Philadelphia, in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. At , including the statue of city founder William Penn atop it, it was the tallest habitable building in the world from 1894 to 1908. It remained the tallest in Pennsylvania until it was surpassed in 1932 by the Gulf Tower in Pittsburgh; it was the tallest in Philadelphia until the construction of One Liberty Place (1984–87) ended the informal gentlemen's agreement that limited the height of buildings in the city. Today, it is the state's 16th-tallest building. City Hall has been the world's tallest masonry building since at least the 1953 collapse of the pinnacle of the Mole Antonelliana in Turin .〔Sources differ on the original height of the Mole Antonelliana's pinnacle, and while the current structure is higher, it was rebuilt and reinforced with steel, ending its claim as a masonry structure. 〕 Its weight is borne by granite and brick walls up to thick. The principal exterior materials are limestone, granite, and marble. In 2007, the building was voted #21 on the American Institute of Architects' list of Americans' 150 favorite U.S. structures.〔Other Philadelphia buildings on the list included the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fisher Fine Arts Library at the University of Pennsylvania, 30th Street Station, and Wanamaker's department store.("America’s Favorite Architecture" ). (February 9, 2005). American Institute of Architects. Retrieved April 23, 2014〕 ==History and description== The building was designed by Scottish-born architect John McArthur, Jr., in the Second Empire style, and was constructed from 1871 until 1901 at a cost of $24 million. City Hall was topped off in 1894, although the interior wasn't finished until 1901. Designed to be the world's tallest building, it was surpassed during construction by the Washington Monument and the Eiffel Tower, though it was at completion the world's tallest habitable building. It was the first modern building (excluding the Eiffel Tower) to be the world's tallest and also was the first secular habitable building to have this record: all previous world's tallest buildings were religious structures, including European cathedrals and, for the previous 3,800 years, the Great Pyramid of Giza. With almost 700 rooms, City Hall is one of the largest municipal buildings in the United States and one of the largest in the world. The building houses three branches of government, the Executive (Mayor's Office), the Legislative (City Council), and the Judicial Branch's Civil Courts (Court of Common Pleas). The building is topped by an , 27-ton bronze statue of city founder William Penn, one of 250 sculptures created by Alexander Milne Calder that adorn the building inside and out. The statue is the tallest atop any building in the world. Calder wished the statue to face south so that its face would be lit by the sun most of the day, the better to reveal the details of his work. The statue actually faces northeast, towards Penn Treaty Park in the Fishtown section of the city, which commemorates the site where William Penn signed a treaty with the local Native American tribe. Beyond Penn Treaty Park is Pennsbury Manor, Penn's country home in Bucks County. Yet another version for why the statue pointed generally north instead of south is that it was the current (1894) architect's method of showing displeasure with the style of the work; that by 1894 it was not in the current, popular Beaux-Arts style; that it was out of date even before it was placed on top of the building. During the 1990s, whenever one of Philadelphia's four major sports teams was close to winning a championship, the statue was decorated with the jersey of that team. The tower features clocks in diameter on all four sides of the metal portion of the tower (larger than the Clock Tower, Palace of Westminster).〔http://www.phila.gov/virtualch//body_pages/history.html〕 This clock was designed by Warren Johnson. The city's only observation deck is located directly below the base of the statue, about above street level. Once enclosed with chain link fence, the observation deck is now enclosed by glass. It is reached in a 6-person elevator whose glass panels allow visitors to see the wooden superstructure that supports the tower. Stairs within the tower are only used for emergency exit. The ornamentation of the tower has been simplified; the huge garlands that festooned the top panels of the tower were removed. Penn's statue is hollow, and a narrow access tunnel through it leads to a small () hatch atop the hat. In the 1950s, the city fathers investigated tearing down City Hall for a new building elsewhere. They found that the demolition would have bankrupted the city due to the building's masonry construction. For many years, City Hall remained the tallest building in Philadelphia by the terms of a gentlemen's agreement that forbade any structure from rising above the William Penn statue. In 1987, it lost this distinction when One Liberty Place was completed. City Hall is a National Historic Landmark. During 2006, it was named a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Philadelphia City Hall」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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