It looks like it has no windows. Xerox Tower in Rochester

Its design was prepared by architect Welton Becket and his team. The Xerox Tower was built in Rochester, New York. The skyscraper is 135 m high and today is the tallest building in the city.

Rochester is a city of just over 200,000. The Xerox company was founded here and is known for producing digital printers and office equipment. It was in the skyscraper described above that the company’s headquarters was located for many years.

Construction of the skyscraper began in 1965 and took two years. The task of preparing the design was entrusted to Welton Becket, who had designed numerous office buildings in California. Among other things, he designed the circular Capitol Records Building in Hollywood. The new skyscraper in Rochester was to be a symbol of the modern city. Its construction in the 1960s came at a time when Rochester had a population of over 300,000. The highest in history. Today, that figure is a third less.

In designing the building, the architect used a concrete structure to which he gave a sculptural form. The monumental ground floor is decorated with three cups that support the structure. Interestingly, the windows in the building are set back from the façade line, with vertical concrete profiles between them along their entire length. This treatment has given the impression, depending on the angle of observation, that the building has no windows.

In front of the entrance, there is a square in the recess. Today, it is used by office workers, but back in the 1970s and 1980s it was used as a skating rink. Three years ago, the building was bought by Gallina Development, which announced that some of the space inside would be adapted for residential use.

Today, the building formally operates under the name Innovation Square. The Mazva was renamed in 2021, but is still referred to as Xerox Tower by locals.

Architecture fans wonder where the similarity between the Xerox Tower and the World Trade Center skyscrapers comes from. It turns out that Welton Becket and Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the WTC towers, had had the opportunity to collaborate several times on the design of other high-rise buildings. They had a similar sense of aesthetics in architecture, perhaps hence the impression of similarity between these projects.

Also read: United States | Skyscraper | Facade | Curiosities | Modernism | whiteMAD on Instagram