LeVeque Tower

The LeVeque Tower is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Charles Howard Crane, and built between 1924 and 1927, for a reported $7.80 million dollars, in Columbus, OH.

LeVeque Tower 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 building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• American Insurance Union Citadel between 1927 and 1945.
• LeVeque-Lincoln Tower between 1945 and 1977.
• LeVeque Tower from 1977 until this day.

Its precise street address is 50 W.Broad Street, Columbus, OH. You can also find it on the map here.

The LeVeque Tower is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Columbus 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 LeVeque Tower was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on March 21^st 1975, and was also included in the Columbus Register of Historic Places on March 21^st 1975.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1980 and 2017.

Charles Howard Crane was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Roger J. Waring.

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 LeVeque Tower a reality:

• John Gill & Sons as the Main Contractor
• American Insurance Union as the Main Developer
• Carl H. Keck and Fritz Albert as the collaborating Artist

The LeVeque Tower can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The LeVeque Tower was completed in 1927, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The LeVeque Tower 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 small cream-colored terracotta blocks. Windows are semicircular at the second level, and rectangular everywhere else. It originally had many figures around the pinnacle, some of which were later removed for fear they would fall.

The tower located in the corner of the structure, with two eighteen-story wings on the east and north sides of the building ends with a hexagonal element with a radio antenna, an observation platform on 44th floor, and an open-air observation balcony on the 46th floor.

Another material found at the LeVeque Tower is marble, found on the lobby's floor. This marble is of a special kind imported from Italy and Belgium, and is combined with a bronze plaque containing the building's horoscope.