Kansas City Power and Light Building

The Kansas City Power and Light Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Hoit, Price & Barnes, and built between 1930 and 1931 in Kansas City, MO.

Kansas City Power and Light 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 Kansas City Power and Light Building is also known, or has been known as, KCP&L Building, Power and Light Building, or Power & Light Apartments.

Its precise street address is 106 West 14th Street, Kansas City, MO. You can also find it on the map here.

The Kansas City Power and Light Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Kansas City 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 Kansas City Power and Light Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on January 9^th 2002.

At the time of its completion in 1931 the Kansas City Power and Light Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included a full-blown gymnasium on the 6th floor with spectator seating where employees could practice indoor basketball, volleyball, wrestling, boxing, and baseball. We might be used to startups having ping-pong tables at their offices today, but back in the 30s this was unseen!.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2014 and 2016. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was NSPJ Architects.

Hoit, Price & Barnes 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 here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Kansas City Power and Light Building a reality:

• Swenson Consatruction Company as the Main Contractor
• Kansas City Power and Light as the Main Developer

The Kansas City Power and Light Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Kansas City Power and Light Building was completed in 1931, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Kansas City Power and Light Building 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 granite clad at street level, continuing with limestone. The building has a stepped facade, with a series of setbacks at different heights.

Other materials found at the Kansas City Power and Light Building include, marble , found in different colors on columns, floors, stairways and wainscoted walls, wrought aluminum, used in balustrades, and glass, found in ornamental plaster ceiling sunken in decorative panels to achieve indirect lighting .