Great American Tower at Queen City Square

The Great American Tower at Queen City Square is a Contemporary skyscraper designed in 2007 by Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, with Gyo Obata as lead architect, and built between 2008 and 2011, for a reported $322 million dollars, in Cincinnati, OH.

Its precise street address is 301 East 4th Street, Cincinnati, OH. You can also find it on the map here.

In 2011 the Great American Tower at Queen City Square was awarded with the Emporis Skyscraper Award.

In addition to the office space and the 11-story parking garage, The Great American Tower at Queen City Square includes a 2,323 square meter pedestrian walkway and a shopping arcade.

Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, with Gyo Obata as the lead architect, 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 Great American Tower at Queen City Square a reality:

• Thornton Tomasetti in charge of Structural Engineering
• Turner Construction as the Main Contractor
• Western & Southern Financial Group as the Main Developer
• Cosentini Associates in charge of MEP Engineering
• FRCH Design Worldwide in charge of Interior Design

The Great American Tower at Queen City Square can be categorized as a Contemporary building.

That being said, and even thought being a contemporary building, probably taking advantage of modern materials, construction techniques, and technology, the design of the Great American Tower at Queen City Square is inspired by the postmodernism style.

The Great American Tower at Queen City Square uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with concrete and steel columns and beams.

A framed tube-in-tube structure uses a central core, known as inner tube, which usually holds stairs, lifts and installations, and a perimeter of columns around it, which form the exterior tube. The interior tube is tipically more massive (often made of reinforced concrete), and the exterior tube is "lighter" (made of steel or concrete columns). Both tubes are conencted via horizontal elements which make up the floors and also transmit any horizontal froces from the facade to the core.

The facade employs a non-load bearing curtain wall system. This means the curtain wall modules are anchored to the building's structural frame at the edges of the floor slabs. The perimeter columns are set back slightly from the facade, allowing them to remain independent of the curtain wall system.

This configuration enables a completely free design of the curtain wall, unencumbered by structural elements, thus providing greater flexibility in aesthetic choices and maximizing the visual impact of the exterior.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a curtain wall with high-performance dark-tinted glass and aluminum frames.

The building is crowned by an elaborate steel structure that, according to the architect Gyo Obata was inspired by the tiara of Princess Diana of Wales.