Architecture
Designed by HKS, Inc. and Duda/Paine Architects, LLP, the Frost Bank Tower is considered one of the most recognizable buildings in Austin. The building starts with a rectangular shape on the ground that eventually becomes a square point in the crown. The base of the building is expressed in honed finish limestone while the main superstructure of the building is a blue low-e glass skin, which is a thicker type of glass, that covers the entire tower. The Frost Bank Tower is one of only two places in the world with blue low-e glass skin, the other being the Reuters Building in New York City, which was the earlier structure. The folded panes of the building step back to create a segmented pyramidal form. Lighting covers the crown, where a section of the building 150 ft (46 m) lights up, and sometimes changes color for special occasions, such as the 2006 Rose Bowl, when the Austin-based University of Texas Longhorns defeated the USC Trojans. More than 200,000 sq ft (60,960 sq m) of glass was used for the facade of the building alone and 45,000 sq ft (13,716 sq m) of glass was used in the crown. The building also contains an 11 level parking garage with spaces for more than 1,400 vehicles.
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Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“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.”
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“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)