Simmons Tower

The Simmons Tower is an International Style skyscraper designed by Harwood K. Smith & Partners, in association with Wilkins Sims Architects, and built between 1984 and 1986, for a reported $72.0 million dollars, in Little Rock, AR.

Simmons Tower is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Capitol Tower between 1986 and 1991.
• TCBY Tower between 1991 and 2004.
• Metropolitan National Bank between 2004 and 2014.
• Simmons Tower from 2014 until this day.

Its precise street address is 425 West Capitol Avenue, Little Rock, AR. You can also find it on the map here.

In 2018 the Simmons Tower was awarded with the ACEC Engineering Excellence Award in the Large Category for Energy.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2017. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Powers.

Harwood K. Smith & Partners was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Wilkins Sims Architects.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Simmons Tower a reality:

• Pickens-Bond Construction Company as the Main Contractor
• John Flake and Jerry Maulden as the Main Developer

The Simmons Tower can be categorized as an International Style building.

The Simmons Tower uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with steel columns and steel and concrete slabs.

A framed tube-in-tube structure uses a central core, known as inner tube, which usually holds stairs, lifts and installations, and a perimeter of columns around it, which form the exterior tube. The interior tube is tipically more massive (often made of reinforced concrete), and the exterior tube is "lighter" (made of steel or concrete columns). Both tubes are conencted via horizontal elements which make up the floors and also transmit any horizontal froces from the facade to the core.

The facade of the building is load bearing. This is a direct consequence of the integration of the exterior "tube" into the facade, something which most framed tube-in-tube buildings do in order to liberate the interior space from structural elements and achieve a more flexible interior.

So the facade of the builing is techinically load-bearing, yes, however, in between the load-bearing colums we find a curtain-wall facade system, which by itself would not be cosnidered load-bearing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features dark-tinted glass framed by a reddish-gray clad, which hides the slabs and columns. On one of its sides, the tower features two setbacks at different heights.