The Plaza Time Building is a commercial office and retail building at 411 Nichols Road on the Country Club Plaza, distinguished by its clock tower modeled after the Palacio de la Equitativa in Madrid. Developed by the J.C. Nichols Company and opened in 1947, the building extended the Plaza’s post-war commercial expansion while maintaining the Spanish-inflected architectural language that J.C. Nichols established at the Plaza’s 1922 opening.
History
The Plaza Time Building opened in 1947, part of a post-war construction wave that added office and retail capacity to the growing Country Club Plaza district. The J.C. Nichols Company developed the building as the Plaza matured from its early 1920s origins into a regional commercial anchor. Edward W. Tanner, the Nichols Company’s principal designer and a long-time Nichols partner, is credited as the building’s architect. Tanner had been the lead designer for Nichols since the Plaza’s earliest construction phase and continued collaborating with the company on major Plaza projects throughout his career.
The building is sometimes confused with the Giralda Tower, a separate Plaza landmark dedicated in 1967 at the corner of West 47th Street and Mill Creek Parkway. The Giralda is a 138-foot half-scale replica of the 12th-century Moorish bell tower in Seville, Spain, and has no structural connection to the Plaza Time Building.
Architecture
The Plaza Time Building’s most prominent feature is its clock tower, which rises more than 100 feet and carries four clock faces. The tower draws from the Palacio de la Equitativa in Madrid, adapting that building’s Baroque-inflected verticality into the Plaza’s broader Spanish Colonial Revival framework. Architectural details include arched openings, terra cotta cornices, a decorative tile facade, and a rounded dome capped with blue and yellow tile and a decorative finial. The overall composition is consistent with the Mediterranean and Moorish Revival vocabulary that Edward Buehler Delk codified in the Plaza’s early buildings and that the Nichols Company maintained as a design standard across subsequent development.
Current use
The Plaza Time Building houses office and retail tenants at 411 Nichols Road. It remains a functioning commercial building within the Country Club Plaza district.
See also
country-club-plaza-opening-1922, the-nichols-company, jc-nichols, edward-buehler-delk
Sources
See also
- Wiki
- country-club-plaza
- country-club-plaza-opening-1922
- jc-nichols
- the-nichols-company
- edward-buehler-delk