The Jackson County Courthouse is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Wight & Wight , and built between 1933 and 1934, for a reported $4.00 million dollars, in Kansas City, MO.
Its precise street address is 415 East 12th Street, Kansas City, MO. You can also find it on the map here.
The building underwent a major restoration in 2005. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was BNIM Architects.
Wight & Wight was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.
But that's not all, there was also a whole team of architects involved, which included: Keene & Simpson, and Frederick C. Gunn.
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 Jackson County Courthouse a reality:
The Jackson County Courthouse 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 Jackson County Courthouse was completed in 1934, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.
The Jackson County Courthouse reaches an architectural height of 295ft (90m). It has a total of 23 floors, 22 above ground and 1 basements.
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1934, the Jackson County Courthouse has mainly been used as Governmental space.
From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a five-story base, above which rises the main tower. The top of the base is decorated with motifs carved into the limestone. This building composition is very similar to the one of its neighbor building, the Kansas City City Hall, also designed by Wight & Wight.
The dark color of the spandrels contrasts with the light color of the limestone, creating a series of pilasters that accentuate the building's verticality. Around the 18th floor, the facade changes, and the vertical space between pilasters changes from windows to an intricate filigree metal grille that rises 3 levels up as a decorative frieze..
Other materials found at the Jackson County Courthouse include, Missouri marble, used on the lobby walls, floors, columns and pilasters, and metal, found in ornamentation covering windows, spandrels and chandelier.
