The Kearns Building is a historic office building in

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City, often shortened to Salt Lake or SLC, is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Utah. It is the county seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in the state. The city is the core of the Salt Lake Ci ...

Utah Utah is a landlocked state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is one of the Four Corners states, sharing a border with Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. It also borders Wyoming to the northea ...

, United States, that is listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

(NRHP).

Description

The 10-story building was designed by Los Angeles architects John Parkinson and

George Bergstrom George Edwin Bergstrom (March 12, 1876 – June 17, 1955) was an American architect who designed many buildings in Los Angeles, California. He also designed The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. Biography George Edwin Bergstrom was born in ...

and constructed 1909–1911. Parkinson & Bergstrom borrowed the style of architect

Louis Sullivan Louis Henry Sullivan (September 3, 1856 – April 14, 1924) was an American architect, and has been called a "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism". He was an influential architect of the Chicago school (architecture), Chicago ...

, and the Kearns Building has been described as Sullivanesque, with a steel reinforced concrete frame and a white terracotta tile facade emphasizing vertical piers below a prominent cornice. The building was added to the

in 1982. With The style of a Louis Sullivan skyscraper was built on classical form, with prominent window and door openings at street level, bands of windows between vertical piers, and a distinctive, highly decorated cornice. Often Sullivan designed porthole windows under a cornice. Parkinson & Bergstrom used centered medallions between spandrels recessed behind the plane of piers to achieve a similar appearance. The Kearns Building was named for

Thomas Kearns Thomas Kearns (April 11, 1862 – October 18, 1918) was an American mining, banking, railroad, and newspaper magnate. He was a US Senator from Utah from 1901 to 1905. Unlike the predominantly Mormon constituents of his state, Senator Kearns was ...

, a wealthy former Utah senator and major stockholder in ''The Salt Lake Tribune''. During construction of the building, Kearns was accused of manipulating the city council and its building code. A third of office space in the building was rented prior to opening in February, 1911, and most of the offices were rented by April of that year. Early tenants of the building included clothiers Gardner & Adams Co. and Rowe & Kelly, and the building included what was billed as "the most beautiful buffet in the United States," the Mecca.

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External links

Office buildings completed in 1911 Late 19th and Early 20th Century American Movements architecture National Register of Historic Places in Salt Lake City Skyscraper office buildings in Salt Lake City {{SaltLakeCountyUT-NRHP-stub

Description

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References

Further reading

External links