One Kansas City Place

The One Kansas City Place is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Patty Berkebile Nelson & Immenschuh, and built between 1985 and 1988, for a reported $140 million dollars, in Kansas City, MO.

One Kansas City Place is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as 1200 Main Street.

Its precise street address is 1200 Main Street, Kansas City, MO. You can also find it on the map here.

In 1988 the One Kansas City Place was awarded with the Missouri Cornerstone Award.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2024.

Patty Berkebile Nelson & Immenschuh 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 One Kansas City Place a reality:

• Seiden & Page/Page McNaghten Associates in charge of Structural Engineering
• Tom Martin Constructions as the Main Contractor
• Kone as the company in charge of the elevators system

The One Kansas City Place can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The One Kansas City Place was completed in 1988. At that time Postmodernism was the prevailing style. Fresh, bold and daring, architects were exploring the freedom of designing without having to follow the strict, sometimes arbitrary rules of a specific architectural movement (which ironically became a movement itself). The One Kansas City Place was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The One Kansas City Place uses a frame structure made of concrete columns and concrete and steel 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 uses a non-load bearing curtain wall system. This means the curtain wall modules are anchored to the building's structural frame, typically by being attached to the edge of the floor slabs. The curtain wall system connects to the slabs using brackets, anchors, and mullions, which transfer the loads imposed by wind and temperature changes, to the building's primary structural elements.

This setup allows the curtain wall to accommodate differential movement between the facade and the structural frame, such as thermal expansion, floor deflection, or sway from wind forces. This system's integration with the slab edges also allows for continuous insulation and weatherproofing layers.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a dark blue tinted glass continuous curtain wall with truncated corners.

Like other landmark buildings around the US, such as the Empire State in New York, the top of the building can light up in different colors to celebrate different events: Red for Valentine's Day, green for St. Patrick's Day, pink for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, red and green for Christmas, etc.