The Kansas City City Hall is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1934 by Wight & Wight , and built between 1935 and 1937, for a reported $4.43 million dollars, in Kansas City, MO.
Its precise street address is 414 E 12th Street, Kansas City, MO. You can also find it on the map here.
Wight & Wight 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 Swenson Construction Company as the Main Contractor.
The Kansas City City Hall 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 Kansas City City Hall was completed in 1937 during the last stretch of waht's officially considered to be the duration of the Art Deco movement. As a late-commer of the Art Deco movement and reflects the mature and refined characteristics of the style.
The Kansas City City Hall reaches an architectural height of 443ft (135m), 525ft (160m) if you count the antenna, with the last accesible floor being 413ft (126m) off the gorund. It has a total of 31 floors, 30 above ground and 1 basements.
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1937, the Kansas City City Hall has mainly been used as Government space.
The Kansas City City Hall 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 a six-tory rectangular base, above which rises the main tower, similar to its neighbor building the Jackson County Courthouse, just across the street.
The top of the base is decorated with a frieze of relief sculptures depicting the early settlement and growth of the Kansas City area. From there on the facade takes on the characteristic pattern of many art-deco skyscrapers, with spandrels and windows that are slightly set back in order to accentuate the verticality of the building.
Another material found at the Kansas City City Hall is brass, found in sculpted elevator doors, elaborate light fixtures in the lobby and in custom doorknob plates.
