How Was Akron Built

Akron’s buildings record what it made.

The locks

The Ohio and Erie Canal climbed the watershed through a flight of locks stepping up through what is now downtown, built in cut sandstone in the 1820s. Several have been restored and the towpath runs beside them, so the reason the city exists is still legible in its centre.

The Goodyear airdock

Built in 1929 to construct the navy’s rigid airships, it is a parabolic hangar 350 metres long and over 60 metres high, enclosing around 1.5 million cubic metres — one of the largest buildings in the world without interior supports when it was completed. Its doors weigh several hundred tonnes each and move on rails. It is still in use and cannot be visited, but it is visible and startling from the road.

Stan Hywet

A 1915 Tudor Revival house of 65 rooms in sandstone and half-timber, built from rubber money and detailed with the seriousness of a genuine Arts and Crafts commission rather than a pastiche.

Company housing

Goodyear Heights and Firestone Park were planned worker suburbs with curving streets and modest bungalows, built by the companies as part of a welfare-capitalist strategy.

The Akron Art Museum

An 1899 Renaissance Revival post office with a 2007 addition by the Viennese practice Coop Himmelblau — a steel and glass roof cantilevering out over the street and the older building, deliberately unreconciled with it. It is the most ambitious piece of contemporary architecture in the city.

Downtown

Early twentieth-century commercial blocks, several converted to flats.