Caxton Office Building, Cleveland Ohio
The building was constructed in 1901-1903. The president of the Caxton Building Company was Ambrose Swasey (1846-1939), founder of Warner and Swasey and a great promoter of the benefits of engineering to mankind. The Caxton Company was a commercial printing and graphic arts business. The building has been devoted to occupants in the graphic arts trades. It was named after William Caxton, the first British printer in the fifteenth century. In 1905 it was occupied by the business of Alfred Cahen which subsequently became the World Publishing Company.
The architect was Frank S. Barnum, official public school architect beginning in 1895, who initiated a "new era" in functional, fireproof, utilitarian school construction. He also designed the Park Building of 1904, called one of the earliest in Cleveland to use floor slabs of reinforced concrete.
Building Description
This is an eight-story Commercial style office building of steel frame construction, concrete foundations, and brick, stone and terra-cotta facing. The center entrance on Huron Road is a large semi-circular archway with Romanesque Revival details. The upper stories of the Huron Road facade are Sullivanesque in treatment, with the piers emphasized and the spandrels suppressed, so that the verticality of the construction is stressed. Some of the floors in the rear part of the building are constructed to bear loads of 300 lbs. per square foot, in order to accommodate printing presses.
The east half of the ground floor facade has been refaced with granite, but there have been no major interior alterations.
Huron Road facade (1973)
