Fleming Building, a historic structure in downtown Des Moines, rises over you here. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002, this building reads like an early 20th-century handshake between Chicago engineering and classical taste. It is an eleven-story office building that rises 174 feet (53 m) above the ground.
Designed by the Chicago architectural firm of D.H. Burnham and Company, it was completed in 1909 in the early Commercial style. Because of its steel frame, it stands among the earliest steel-framed buildings in Iowa, a technical statement that let architects shape taller, lighter façades. But Burnham's work never abandoned good proportions: you can see elements of the Beaux-Arts style in the building's proportions and details, a classical vocabulary softened into tidy, urban restraint.
Imagine the patience that went into aligning windows, cornices, and ornament so the whole eleven-story mass reads as an elegant column in the city. Notice those Beaux-Arts proportions eleven stories up, an elegant column of steel rising 174 feet above this downtown street.