U.S. Bancorp Tower

The U.S. Bancorp Tower is a Modern Style skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, in association with Pietro Belluschi, and built between 1981 and 1983, for a reported $60.0 million dollars, in Portland, OR.

U.S. Bancorp Tower is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Big Pink.

Its precise street address is Address 111 SW 5th Avenue, Portland, OR. You can also find it on the map here.

In 2015 the U.S. Bancorp Tower was awarded with the IIDA Oregon Design Excellence Award for the renovation of the atrium.

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 2002 and 2015.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Pietro Belluschi.

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 U.S. Bancorp Tower a reality:

• Howard S. Wright Construction as the Main Contractor
• U.S. Bancorp as the Main Developer
• Glumac in charge of MEP Engineering
• Scott & Edwards Architecture in charge of Interior Design

The U.S. Bancorp Tower can be categorized as a Modern Style building.

By their own nature, the Modern and International Styles can still look current, even in contemporary buildings. So that's not to say the U.S. Bancorp Tower appeared old or outdated when it was completed, but Skidmore, Owings & Merrill certainly did not take many risks when it came to choosing the design style. This made the building look more "classic" and integrated within the city's architecture.

The U.S. Bancorp Tower uses a frame structure made of steel columns and poured concrete over metal decking 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 modular, or panelized system. This type of facade can function as either a window wall or a curtain wall, depending on the design. Unlike traditional glass curtain walls or window walls though, the modular facade is not primarily composed of glass. Instead, it often features more opaque panels that mimic masonry or stone-clad finishes, with smaller windows cut into the panels.

This type of facade allows the building to benefit from the modern qualities of a curtain wall while giving the design team flexibility to achieve visual aesthetics beyond the all-glass modern skyscraper.

Even though we've chosen to categorize the facade as panelized, it's worth noting that the top section of the building, which is only glass, is a straightforward curtain wall system with purely glass panels.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features Spanish Big Pink granite and Pittsburgh flat glass, glazed with a semi-transparent layer of copper and silver, which also appears pink when viewed from the outside. The combination of these two materials gives the building its distinctive pink tone, which has earned the tower its nickname of "Big Pink".