The Central Heating Plant is a power station

Power station

A power station is an industrial facility for the generation of electric energy....

 located at 325 13th Street, SW in the Southwest Federal Center neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

 which serves most of the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 federal government

Federal government of the United States

The federal government of the United States is the national government of the constitutional republic of fifty states that is the United States of America. The federal government comprises three distinct branches of government: a legislative, an executive and a judiciary. These branches and...

 buildings near the National Mall

National Mall

The National Mall is an open-area national park in downtown Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. The National Mall is a unit of the National Park Service , and is administered by the National Mall and Memorial Parks unit...

. Operated by the General Services Administration

General Services Administration

The General Services Administration is an independent agency of the United States government, established in 1949 to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies. The GSA supplies products and communications for U.S...

, it was designed by architect Paul Philippe Cret

Paul Philippe Cret

Paul Philippe Cret was a French-American architect and industrial designer. For more than thirty years, he headed the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.- Biography :...

 in 1933. At the time of its construction it was the largest such heating facility in the United States and served 22 federal buildings. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places

National Register of Historic Places

The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...

 in 2007.

Cret used Art Deco

Art Deco

Art deco , or deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris in the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era. The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and interior design, industrial design, fashion and...

 styling for the essentially industrial building, a departure from the prevailing Washington classicism

Classicism

Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...

, but was able to integrate it with its surroundings through careful massing and detailing. Pilaster

Pilaster

A pilaster is a slightly-projecting column built into or applied to the face of a wall. Most commonly flattened or rectangular in form, pilasters can also take a half-round form or the shape of any type of column, including tortile....

s and vertical ribbons of windows stand in for classical colonnade

Colonnade

In classical architecture, a colonnade denotes a long sequence of columns joined by their entablature, often free-standing, or part of a building....

s. Cret designed the roof profile so that the plant's smokestacks did not project above the equipment screen, satisfying the concerns of the District of Columbia Commission on Fine Arts, which had jurisdiction over the design. The three octagonal smokestacks rise only 42 feet (12.8 m). Limestone

Limestone

Limestone is a sedimentary rock composed largely of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of calcium carbonate . Many limestones are composed from skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral or foraminifera....

 relief

Relief

Relief is a sculptural technique. The term relief is from the Latin verb levo, to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is thus to give the impression that the sculpted material has been raised above the background plane...

 panels illustrate the building's purpose with depictions of a boiler, safety valve, generator, fan and heat exchanger. The building is noteworthy as an early example of Modernism

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

-influenced architecture, and as a notably attractive building in its own right.

Originally designed to burn coal

Coal

Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...

, the Central Heating Plant has been converted to use coal, oil, or natural gas. A central refrigeration plant

Refrigeration plant

A refrigeration plant uses gas, liquid, and mechanical energy to move heat from one place to another. A liquid, such as ammonia, which has a low boiling temperature is allowed to pass into a space via tubing. As the pressure in the ammonia drops, the liquid begins to boil, and enter a phase...

 constructed in 1957 obscures the east elevation.

See also

• National Register of Historic Places listings in Southwest Quadrant, Washington, D.C.

External links

• Central Heating Plant at the U.S. General Services Administration