North Dakota State Capitol Building

The North Dakota State Capitol Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Joseph Bell DeRemer and William F. Kurke, in association with Holabird and Root, and built between 1932 and 1934, for a reported $50.0 million dollars, in Bismarck, ND.

North Dakota State Capitol Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Skyscraper on the Prairie.

Its precise street address is 600 East Boulevard Avenue, Bismarck, ND. You can also find it on the map here.

Until 2001, a tunnel on the south side allowed vehicles to access the building. After the September 11 attacks and for security reasons, only pedestrians are now allowed access..

The building underwent a major restoration between 2019 and 2020. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was J2 Studio.

Joseph Bell DeRemer and William F. Kurke was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Holabird and Root.

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 North Dakota State Capitol Building a reality:

• Lundoff-Bicknell Construction Company as the Main Contractor
• Edgar Miller as the collaborating Artist

The North Dakota State Capitol Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The North Dakota State Capitol Building 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 North Dakota State Capitol Building uses a frame structure made of steel 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 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 light-toned Indiana limestone, combined with narrow vertical windows that create a vertical striped pattern that reinforces the building’s visual verticality.

The lower side wings extend east and west from the base of the tower, maintaining the same limestone and window pattern..