Architecture
About twenty-five mid-rise and high-rise buildings ranging up to 40 stories tall pierce the skyline. Three of the five tallest skyscrapers in the state of Arizona are in Downtown Phoenix. Chase Tower, at 40 stories and a height of 483 feet (147 m), is the tallest. US Bank Center’s 31 floors and 407 feet (124 m) tall is number two. 44 Monroe, at 34 floors and a height of 380 feet (120 m) is Phoenix’s 4th tallest. One Central Park East tops out at 26 floors and is 116.7 meters (382 ft) tall.
The architecture of Downtown offers many examples of 20th century architectural styles including the Beaux Arts-style Security Building and Hotel San Carlos. Art Deco design can be seen in Luhrs Tower, Hotel Monroe (formerly the Professional Building) and the Orpheum Lofts. International Style was popular from the 1960s to the 1980s and prime examples include Chase Tower and US Bank Center. The short-lived brutalist style has only one example in downtown Phoenix in the Wells Fargo Plaza. Post modern, with its return to architectural ornamentation, can be seen in the Bank of America Tower, both towers at the Arizona Center and, most notably, in the crown of the Phoenix City Hall Building.
The recent trend of urban living has led to the conversion of the 1930s-era Phoenix Title and Trust building to condominiums called Orpheum Lofts; as well as the newly built residential towers 44 Monroe and The Summit at Copper Square, with many more in the planning stages. Taylor Place, two 13-story towers which serve as the new residential community of the Downtown campus of Arizona State University, opened in August 2008. Alta Phoenix Lofts, a multi-level, 332-unit apartment project, is rising north of the Arizona Center.
Read more about this topic: Downtown Phoenix
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“I don’t think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.”
—Roy Lichtenstein (b. 1923)
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)