The Republic Plaza Building is a Modern Style skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and built between 1982 and 1984 in Denver, CO.
Its precise street address is 330 17th Street, Denver, CO. You can also find it on the map here.
In 2023 the Republic Plaza Building was awarded with the DCC Award Winner.
The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 2022 and 2016.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.
Commonly known as SOM, the firm was founded in Chicago in 1936 and has grown to be one of the largest architecture firms in the world.
Even long after its founders passed away, SOM has remained at the top of worldwide architectural excellence by attracting visionary architects. Amongst their most notorious partners we find names such as Gordon Bunshaft, Bruce Graham, Walter Netsch, Adrian Smith, Myron Goldsmith or David Childs.
SOM has also managed to grow and evolve to tackle the architectural challenges of each time, whatever those might be, and today is committed to aspects as important as efficiency and sustainability, as core values of their designs.
With a legacy spanning decades, SOM continues to shape the skylines of cities around the world, and is a usual contestant in any competition or selection process to design large-scale or iconic buildings and structures.
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 Republic Plaza Building a reality:
The Republic Plaza Building can be categorized as a Modern Style building.
The modern style, also referred to as Modernism in the U.S. (distinct from the European Modernist movement), is characterized by minimal ornamentation, clean lines, and the use of materials such as glass, steel, and concrete. This style prioritizes functionality and the honest expression of materials and structure.
Modern architecture in the U.S. follows many principles of the International Style but with slightly less rigid rules than those of the purist European International Stylists like Le Corbusier, or even those who imported the style to the U.S. like Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius.
Modern skyscrapers often feature expansive glass curtain walls, open floor plans, and focus on volume over mass. This blend of innovation and simplicity defined the modern skyscraper, creating the sleek, functional urban landscapes prominent in mid-20th-century U.S. architecture.
By their own nature, the Modern and International Styles can still look current, even in contemporary buildings. So that's not to say the Republic Plaza Building appeared old or outdated when it was completed, but Skidmore, Owings & Merrill certainly did not take many risks when it came to choosing the design style. This made the building look more "classic" and integrated within the city's architecture.
The Republic Plaza Building reaches an architectural height of 715ft (218m). It has a total of 56 floors.
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1984, the Republic Plaza Building has mainly been used as Commercial space.
The building features three floors dedicated to shops, restaurants, and services, including an art exhibition space called 'Art in Public Places,' which showcases artists from Colorado and the surrounding region.
The remaining 53 floors are occupied by offices and include a gym available to tenants.
The Republic Plaza Building uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with reinforced concrete columns and beams.
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 modular facade system, which by itself would not be cosnidered load-bearing.
From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features polished Sardinian granite panels in light tones, with flush-mounted windows arranged in a uniform grid across all elevations and framed by narrow aluminum grille bands
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