Koppers Tower

The Koppers Tower is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, and built between 1927 and 1929, for a reported $5.30 million dollars, in Pittsburgh, PA.

Its precise street address is 436 Seventh Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA. You can also find it on the map here.

At the time of its completion in 1929 the Koppers Tower incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included the use of limestone and granite to clad the facade, which was a departure from the brick and terra cotta that were commonly used in buildings at the time. The use of these materials gave the building a more modern and sophisticated look, and helped to set it apart from other buildings in the city.

Graham, Anderson, Probst & White 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 Koppers Tower a reality:

• Mellon-Stuart as the Main Contractor
• Andrew W. Mellon as the Main Developer
• Vincent Nesbert as the collaborating Artist

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

The Koppers Tower was completed in 1929, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Koppers 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 a three-story polished granite base, with the rest of the facade clad in Indiana limestone. The silhouette of the building has a series of setbacks, located on the 21st and 29th levels, and a distinctive castle-like roof made of copper sheets.

The prominent entrance on Seventh Avenue features stone details, brass, and a beautiful square chandelier.

Other materials found at the Koppers Tower include, marble , Italian Cremo, Spanish Rajo Alcante and Tennessee marbles are found in the three-story atrium walls, and bronze, used in elevator doors, clocks and railings.