Foshay Tower

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.

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.

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

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.

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.