250 Douglas Place Building

The 250 Douglas Place Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Lundgren and Mauer, in association with Platt, Adams, Bradley & Associates, and built between 1968 and 1970 in Wichita, KS.

250 Douglas Place Building 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:

• Holiday Inn Wichita-Plaza between 1969 and 1997.
• Garvey Center.

Its precise street address is 250 W. Douglas St, Wichita, KS. You can also find it on the map here.

The 250 Douglas Place Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Wichita and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Postmodernism style. Because of that, the 250 Douglas Place Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on June 2^nd 2021.

The building is situated between two other buildings, each with 10 floors, forming a 4.5-acre urban complex known as the Garvey Center. This complex comprises four commercial buildings, a covered parking garage, a central plaza, and an outdoor parking lot.

The building underwent a major restoration between 1997 and 2015. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Hanney & Associates Architects.

Lundgren and Mauer was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Platt, Adams, Bradley & Associates.

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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Robert Lightner as the Main Developer.

The 250 Douglas Place Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The 250 Douglas Place Building was completed in 1970. At that time Postmodernism was the prevailing style. Fresh, bold and daring, architects were exploring the freedom of designing without having to follow the strict, sometimes arbitrary rules of a specific architectural movement (which ironically became a movement itself). The 250 Douglas Place Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The vertical elements of the concrete and steel's structure, which transmit all loads vertically until the foudnations, are made out of concrete and steel, whreas the horizontal elements that make up each floor are made out of concrete.

The facade in this case is non-load bearing, which means that it does not serve as a structural element, and therefore the architects had total freedom to work on its design without worrying about the support of the building.

The cross-shaped structure of the building rises above a projecting white concrete base with seven floors. This material continues along the corners, and its construction utilized a slipform system.

The structure of the top three floors, which form the building’s crown, is made of steel and rests atop the concrete shaft.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features blue-tinted glass and metal mullions in the central sections, with recessed white concrete corners that. The white concrete is especially prominent on the lower floors.

The crown of the building consists of three floors that break the continuous pattern of the lower levels, interrupting the vertical repetition and visually capping the tower.