The City Place I is a Modern Style skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and built between 1980 and 1984, for a reported $150 million dollars, in Hartford, CT.
Its precise street address is 185 Asylum Street, Hartford, CT. You can also find it on the map here.
The building underwent a major restoration in 2010.
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 City Place I a reality:
The City Place I 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 City Place I 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 City Place I reaches an architectural height of 538ft (164m). It has a total of 41 floors, 38 above ground and 3 basements.
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1984, the City Place I has mainly been used as Commercial space.
The City Place I uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete, steel slabs.
A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.
The facade of the building however, is load bearing. This doesn't imply that it is a traditional load-bearing wall. Rather, it means that the structure's exterior pillars have been pushed to the very edges, becoming integrated with the facade, and therefore, technically, a part of it.
From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features reddish granite and dark-tinted glass windows mounted on thin dark frames. The granite empathizes with the refined yet monumental presence of the building in the city's skyline.
A defining feature of the design is the arrangement of the windows, which protrude slightly in a V-shaped configuration. This unique geometry not only enhances the building’s sculptural quality and verticality, but also allows for improved sightlines from within, maximizing panoramic views of the cityscape.
