Last night, EMC Insurance Companies made some lighting changes on its downtown campus, with new light-emitting diodes to show off the south side of EMC’s 20-story building at Seventh and Walnut Streets. The new lights will are designed to brighten the building facade while reducing the amount of light that escapes into the night sky. The lights will reduce energy consumption by nearly 89 percent. Take a look at the before and after photos, what a difference! Maybe Principal and Ruan will take notice and light their buildings back up with cheaper energy choices.

Before the new lighting	After the new lighting

This past weekend, I got to attend the Downtown Lighting Festival at Brenton Skating Plaza, afterwards I was taking some pictures of all the beautiful lights around downtown. I think Des Moines has done an excellent job this year with it’s lighting. The tree lined streets around downtown host a variety of light colors on the trees, especially in the East Village and around the Allied Headquarters.

I do have a complaint, what’s up with the Ruan Building, our second tallest building downtown? In years past, it used to be lit up with either white or red lights as shown in this photo.

I know it can be expensive to light up the building with incandescent bulbs, but if they laid out some initial cash to buy LEDs, they should be able to run those year-round. Just take a look at some examples that I have found from around the world that illustrate what a difference LED lights can make. The Ruan Building could be very creative in their use.

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I recently updated the websites header to rotate through a collection of images. Here’s the ones I currently have. I hope to make more from fall and winter photos soon.

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Looking out from my 9th floor unit I have a clear view of the back on one of Des Moines’ oldest landmarks. The umbrella sign was erected in 1963 on top of the Insurance Exchange Building at 5th and Grand Avenue. The sign was the logo for the Travelers Insurance Company until the logo was abandoned in 1995. A few years later, the insurance company was acquired by Citigroup, which kept the umbrella logo and sold the insurance company.

The 50-foot wide sign, that’s about 40-foot tall, can easily be seen driving down I-235 and is is still one of the first sights that drivers from the east notice when approaching the downtown on I-235.

The sign faced dismemberment a few times since it was installed, and was pretty run down until, left neglected over the years, but in the fall of 2005, the sign returned to it’s former glory. That’s when the Graham Group, owner of the Insurance Exchange Building on which the sign sits, agreed to take over maintenance of the sign.

The Travelers sign has become an unlikely Des Moines landmark.

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I’m currently working on a virtual tour of downtown but until I get that finished, I wanted to highlight some information on the 10 tallest buildings in downtown Des Moines. Interestingly enough the three tallest are on Grand Avenue, maybe that’s why they call it Grand Avenue.

801 Grand Address: 801 Grand Avenue Height: 192.0 m | Floors: 45 | Built 1991 Architectural Style: Post Modern Architects: Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum This is the tallest building in the state of Iowa. The bottom three floors of this tower are a retail mall connected to the downtown skywalk system. A great restaurant, 801 Steak & Chop is located here. A private restaurant, the Embassy Club resides on the top two floors of this building. The top half of the tower features a series of terraces and setbacks to visually decrease the building’s impact on the city skyline. 801 Grand Avenue is topped by eight-sided pyramid, which being clad with copper provides a unique sign of the tower. It was named one of the 50 Most Significant Iowa Buildings of the 20th Century by the Iowa chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

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The architectural tour I took this week got me really thinking about downtown buildings. So I started doing a little research on our city skyline and the various buildings that make up that skyline and here’s what I found out.

The city of Des Moines has always had, what some consider fairly substantial skyline, for a population-base of its size. For example, the 19-story Equitable Building that was built in 1924 was at the time the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. It stayed the tallest building in Iowa until the 25-story Financial Center was completed in 1972. The Financial Center only held the honor of tallest building in Iowa for two years. In 1974 the 36-story Ruan Center was added to the Des Moines skyline. It would be 17 more years before the Ruan Center would get knocked down to second place by the 801 Grand tower that was completed in 1991. It has been another 17 years now, and no other taller structure is in the works, hopefully this will change, how else can we keep up with the Joneses, I mean with that city to the west, Omaha.

According to some there’s this whole rivalry between Des Moines and Omaha. Des Moines has over a half million people in the metro and Omaha has a over three-quarters of a million, yet the Des Moines skyline seems larger than Omaha’s. I’m sure if all depends on what you use to analyze or justify your statistics. Sure Omaha has a taller building than we do, by a whole 0.9 meters. So let’s take a look at this table that I put together that compares the number of buildings in four size ranges.

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So this evening I finally made it to one of the Architecture @ Hand Walking Tours. I did the North tour and had a great time learning about some of the buildings that I walk by everyday. The architectural details that my guide pointed out are things I have totally missed, but now will notice again and again on my walks through downtown. I never knew so many famous architects have designed buildings in our downtown and that we had so many different styles of architecture for a city our size. Now, I can’t wait till next summer when I can do the West, East and the new South tour. I would highly recommend these tours to anyone, it will help you experience downtown in a new and different way.

One of my favorite buildings, the Ruan Building, was completed in 1975, and stands 460 feet tall with 36 floors. It’s the second tallest building in Iowa. The outside is made out of Cor-Ten steel, which is an alloy designed to withstand the weather and require no maintenance (cleaning or painting). The building was supposed to weather to a rich red-brown color, but due to the cleaner atmosphere here, never quite made it to that color. I learned that the streaking on the building came from the window caulking that was used melting and running down the side of the building. A lot of people here thought the building was a big rust bucket, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I love the look of it.

From the Iowa Public Television site, I found this list of the 50 most significant Iowa Buildings
of the 20th Century as selected by the AIA-Iowa Chapter. The majority of these buildings are in downtown Des Moines. Dates listed here are completion dates.
* Designates building of the decade.
** Designates building of the century (which is also building of its decade.)

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One of my favorite hobbies is photography. I’m no Herb Ritz nor do I ever expect to be. I am just a guy with a digital camera who takes as many photos as he can. I tend to focus on architecture, signs and other random elements of life. I’m usually out every week taking photos of something downtown. I think our city is extremely photogenic, and the variety of photographs that I’ve come across on the internet, leads me to believe that’s a pretty common belief.  So I thought I would share with you some great links to some really outstanding Des Moines photography.

One of the best local photographers of city buildings and skylines is absolutedsm.com. I see their pictures all over the place, in advertisements, skywalk billboards and has reference shots in web postings. Here are a couple of links to my favorite galleries:

• Downtown Galleries
  
• Downtown Construction Projects
  

If you like aerial photography, www.urban-photos.com specializes in aerial photography of city skylines and of course Des Moines is one of the featured cities. Their Des Moines gallery has some truly outstanding images that could only be captured from a helicopter high above the city. I think these three are my favorites:

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Did someone steal the the 4-ton 25-foot tall Nomeade sculpture from Western Gateway Park? No, but if you drive down Locust Street right now, you won’t see it. That’s because it has been temporarily moved to the Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Arrangements for loan of the art were made prior to purchase of the piece. Prior to being in Des Moines, it was in Miami, Florida at Miami Beach’s Lummus Park.I used to walk in that park all the time, when I lived in south Florida. It’s will be back this coming spring as part of the Pappajohn Sculpture Park that is currently being developed between 13th and 15th Streets and Locust Street and Grand Avenue.

The Nomade was purchased in December 2007 by John and Mary Pappajohn and placed in a temporary location in Western Gateway Park. This piece and 16 additional sculptures by world-renowned artists are being donated to the Des Moines Art Center. John and Mary Pappajohn, local Des Moines philanthropists, are donating a collection of outdoor sculpture valued at between $20 million and $30 million for Des Moines’ Western Gateway Park. This donation is believed to be the largest single public gift in Des Moines’ history.

The Pappajohns’ sculpture donations include:

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Summer is almost over and I’m mad at myself for never finding the time to do the Architecture @ Hand Walking Tour. There’s only one more date left for this year, Thursday September 4th. I’m going try my best not to miss it. The Iowa Architectural Foundation offers these walking tours as a unique approach to getting to know downtown Des Moines by learning fun facts about both old and new downtown buildings.

The walking tours are led by local architects and there are three different tours to choose from: North, West and the East Village tour. The tours begin at 5:30pm and Nollen Plaza (corner of 3rd and Locust, across from the Civic Center). The tours are typical 90 minutes long and they recommend everyone to wear comfortable walking shoes. There is a $10 per person suggested donation to benefit the educational programs of the Iowa Architectural Foundation. The foundation’s goal is promote the awareness of the contribution of architecture and community design to the quality of life in Iowa since 1989.

In doing some research for this post, I found a link for some great old postcard shots of Des Moines.

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