Salesforce Tower

The Salesforce Tower is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by KlingStubbins, with Hugh Stubbins as lead architect, and built between 1987 and 1990 in Indianapolis, IN.

Salesforce 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:

• Bank One Tower between 1990 and 2004.
• Chase Tower between 2005 and 2017.
• Salesforce Tower from 2017 until this day.

Its precise street address is 111 Monument Circle, Indianapolis, IN. You can also find it on the map here.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2019. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Mark Cavagnero Associates Architects.

KlingStubbins, with Hugh Stubbins as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

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 Salesforce Tower a reality:

• LeMessurier in charge of Structural Engineering
• Huber, Hunt & Nichols as the Main Contractor
• KONE as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Galbreath Company as the Main Developer

The Salesforce Tower can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Salesforce Tower was completed in 1990. By 1990 the Postmodernism movement was experiencing a transition. Critics argued that Postmodernism, initially a rebellious and innovative style, had become formulaic and commercialized, and so the trend started moving away from blending historical styles, irony, and playful ornamentation, and begun to give way to emerging architectural trends concerned with more present matters such as technology, ecology or sustainability.

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

The structural framework of the building consists of 24 columns.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features polished granite panels in light tones imported from Europe, with anodized aluminum frames and windows with tinted glass.

The building is topped with a stepped pyramidal roof that serves as the base for two twin antennas, one of which is for communication and the other decorative.