Fountain Place

Fountain Place is a 60-story late-modernist skyscraper in downtown. Standing at a structural height of 720 ft., it is the fifth-tallest in Dallas, and the 15th-tallest in Texas. Original plans for the project called for twin towers, with the second tower rotated 90 degrees from the original, to be built on an adjacent block, but with the collapse of the Texas oil, banking and real estate industry and the savings and loan scandal of in the 1980s, the project was never completed. The building was designed by the award winning architects I.M. Pei and Partners and was completed in 1986. The landscape and namesake fountains were designed by Dan Kiley. The building is known for its unique architecture—it was designed as a large, multi-faceted prism. Its various slanted sides cause the building to have a completely different profile from all directions. The building gets its name from the array of 172 dancing fountains in the plaza at its base. The landscape and namesake fountains were designed by Dan Kiley, a world-class landscape architect who also designed the surrounding at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and the St. Louis Gateway Arch. The Fountain Plaza Central Fountain has 217 water jets and specific water features were designed by Water Entertainment Technologies (WET Inc.), formerly a subsidiary of Disney that designed Disney World and Epcot water features. Fountain Place has over 26,000 windows, and is one of the heaviest buildings of its size, with 42,000 tons of steel from the 5th floor down. At the time of construction, it was the tallest silicone glazed building in the world, with a sleek appearance in place of a bulky gasket and mullion system. To avoid a waterfall effect on rainy days from the slopes, the building's window mullions are designed with an internal gutter system. Every other mullion literally serves as a gutter and takes the water to the bottom of the slope internally. The floor plates in the upper level of the building are all in the shape of a "rhomboid." Since there is no roof, there are the 13 window washing rooms in the building where the gondolas come out through the windows. The elevators are gearless and run smoothly at a speed of 1200 ft. per minute, state of the art at the time of construction and still competitive with current elevators.

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