The Southwestern Bell Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Mauran, Russell & Crowell, in association with I.R.Timlin, and built between 1925 and 1926 in St Louis, MO.
Its precise street address is 1010 Pine Street, St Louis, MO. You can also find it on the map here.
Mauran, Russell & Crowell was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with I.R.Timlin.
The Southwestern Bell Building 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 Southwestern Bell Building was completed in 1926, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.
The Southwestern Bell Building reaches an architectural height of 397ft (121m). It has a total of 28 floors, 26 above ground and 2 basements.
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1926, the Southwestern Bell Building has mainly been used as Commercial space.
The Southwestern Bell 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 numerous setbacks at its upper heights. This is to avoid throwing shadows on the surrounding streets and its 17 individual roofs. It was one of the first structures in the city to be designed with these concerns in mind.
