After last week’s post about Douglas Ellington’s drawing for a city auditorium, Asheville architect Jim Samsel, with an interest in buildings that didn’t get built, brought our attention to this 16-story building also designed by Douglas Ellington, and also never built. The site location is at Pack Square next to the Langren Hotel, the current location of the Akzona-Biltmore Building designed by I.M. Pei. For bearings, the Langren Hotel was at the later site of a parking lot that was just razed in February 2015 for a future AC Hotel (a new Marriott brand in the United States) to open summer of 2016 at 10 Broadway.
The original Ellington drawing is owned by the Asheville Art Museum, with a scan of the drawing in the Douglas Ellington collection at North Carolina State University libraries. (https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/aam_DE03800_0001)
Rendering, Unbuilt project, N Pack Square-Asheville
Catherine Bishir, who referred to Ellington’s Asheville City Hall as a “delectable masterpiece of Art Deco,” noted that Ellington “capped off the boom era (of the late 1920s) with an extraordinary collection of Art Deco buildings.” It appears that we only know the half of it.
A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Western North Carolina, Catherine W. Bishir, Michael T. Southern & Jennifer F. Martin, 1999.
Post by Zoe Rhine, librarian.
Love the post and the image! Another historic gem in the Asheville Art Museum’s collection!