Foshay Tower

skyscraper
art-deco
MN
Minneapolis

About the Foshay Tower in Minneapolis
1. Building Catalogations
Architect and team
Architectural style
Spaces and uses
Structure and materials

The Foshay Tower is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Magney & Tusler Architects, and built between 1927 and 1929, for a reported $3.75 million dollars, in Minneapolis, MN.

Its precise street address is 821 Marquette Avenue, Minneapolis, MN. You can also find it on the map here.

The Foshay Tower is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Minneapolis and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Foshay Tower was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on April 10^th 0078.

Building's timeline

Added to the NRHP

0078

1946

Construction begins

1927

Construction completed

1929

years ago

2024

Architect and team

Magney & Tusler Architects 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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Wilbur Burton Foshay as the Main Developer.

Architectural Style

The Foshay Tower can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Art Deco movement flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, with many historians marking the outbreak of World War II as its final decline. Even though a couple of decades might not seem as much, the Art Deco movement had a great impact on architecture, and it's widely represented in many American cities due to the development boom that happened during that time.

Art Deco marked the abandonment of traditional historicism and the embracement of modern living and the age of the machine. In architecture, that meant leaving behind the ornaments of Beux-Arts and Neo-Gothic buildings and instead favoring simplicity and visual impact through geometric shapes, clean lines, and symmetrical designs. Ornaments were still an important part of the design, but they became bold and lavish, and were often inspired by ancient cultures or industrial imagery, instead of nature.

The Foshay Tower was completed in 1929, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

Spaces & Uses

The Foshay Tower reaches an architectural height of 446ft (136m), 610ft (186m) if you count the antenna. It has a total of 32 floors, served by 4 elevators.

When it opened its doors to the public in 1929, the Foshay Tower was primarily used as Commercial space. That however, is no longer the case, and today it mainly provides Hotel space.

About the Hotel

The hotel is a 4 stars category hotel, with a total of 230 rooms available to the public. The name of the hotel is W Minneapolis -The Foshay. You can learn more about the hotel by visiting their website here.

Materials & Structure

The Foshay Tower uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete 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 is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features Indiana limestone from the base all the way to the top of the obelisk-shaped tower. The tower has 750 windows and gently sloping sides where each floor is slightly smaller than the one below.

Sources

npgallery.nps.gov