Mercantile National Bank Building

The Mercantile National Bank Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Walter W. Ahlschlager, and built between 1941 and 1943 in Dallas, TX.

Mercantile National Bank Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as The Merc.

Its precise street address is 1704 Main Street, Dallas, TX. You can also find it on the map here.

The Mercantile National Bank Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Dallas 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 Mercantile National Bank Building was officially declared as a national landmark on November 27^th 2006.

Walter W. Ahlschlager 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 Donald Nelson.

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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Millard Sheets as the collaborating Artist.

The Mercantile National Bank Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Mercantile National Bank Building 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 series of setbacks and is crowned by an ornamental four-faced clock along with a decorative spire .