History

The Kansas City Power & Light Company commissioned its headquarters tower in 1930, at the peak of the American commercial skyscraper wave. Hoit, Price & Barnes had established themselves as Kansas City’s premier commercial architects through commissions including 909 Walnut (completed 1930) and several downtown office buildings. For the Power & Light commission they produced a design that combined the setback geometry mandated by contemporary zoning with the Gothic ornamental crown that distinguished their most prestigious work.

Construction proceeded through the early Depression and the building was completed in 1931. Its terracotta cladding — coloured to shift from warm cream at the base to a lighter tone at the upper setbacks — gave the tower a visual presence calibrated to the broad perspective of 14th Street. The Gothic pinnacles at the crown, a quotation from ecclesiastical architecture that American commercial architects of the period deployed with some frequency, here read as a deliberate signal of corporate aspiration.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century the area around the building was redeveloped as the Power & Light District, a commercial entertainment precinct that took its name from the historic tower at its centre. The building itself was renovated and its ground floor activated with retail and hospitality uses, restoring it to civic prominence at the heart of the district that bears its name.