The Tower Petroleum Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Mark Lemmon, and built between 1930 and 1931 in Dallas, TX.
Tower Petroleum Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as The Tower Building.
Its precise street address is 1907 Elm Street, Dallas, TX. You can also find it on the map here.
Mark Lemmon was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.
The Tower Petroleum Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.
The Art Deco movement flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, with many historians marking the outbreak of World War II as its final decline. Even though a couple of decades might not seem as much, the Art Deco movement had a great impact on architecture, and it's widely represented in many American cities due to the development boom that happened during that time.
Art Deco marked the abandonment of traditional historicism and the embracement of modern living and the age of the machine. In architecture, that meant leaving behind the ornaments of Beux-Arts and Neo-Gothic buildings and instead favoring simplicity and visual impact through geometric shapes, clean lines, and symmetrical designs. Ornaments were still an important part of the design, but they became bold and lavish, and were often inspired by ancient cultures or industrial imagery, instead of nature.
The Tower Petroleum Building was completed in 1931, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.
The Tower Petroleum Building reaches an architectural height of 315ft (96m). It has a total of 23 floors, served by 5 elevators.
When it opened its doors to the public in 1931, the Tower Petroleum Building was primarily used as Commercial space. That however, is no longer the case, and today it mainly provides Hotel space, with other complementary uses such as commercial space.
The hotel is a 4 stars category hotel, with a total of 177 rooms available to the public. The name of the hotel is Saint Elm Hotel. You can learn more about the hotel by visiting their website here.
From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features polished black granite facade clad on the lower floor, followed by limestone cladding up until the 4th, and light-colored bricks from there on. The green-colored spandrels give the building a touch of color which is not rare to see in art-deco buildings.
Other materials found at the Tower Petroleum Building include, terrazzo, found on floors with zigzag designs, marble, used in black and red tones on the lobby's walls, and brass, seen in elevators doors and in terrazzo joints, adding one more layer of ornamentation to the floors.
