Century Building (Indianapolis, Indiana)

 office building, high-rise, 1900s construction

Office Building at 36 S. Pennsylvania constructed in 1910. The Century Building got its name upon construction in 1901 and earned it by lasting into the new millennium. Constructed for an investment group led by John W. & Edward Schmidt, sons of the brewer Christian F. Schmidt, the Century was designed to house the large printing presses of multiple printing companies. It represents the commercial printing industry that coexisted with the wholesale trade in the Wholesale District. It remained one of the city’s printing headquarters until 1946. In 1982, the property was acquired by the Century Building Partnership. After a 10 million renovation, designed by HDG Architects, the building was reopened in 1983 as offices.

The seven-story building of orange-brown brick is rectangular in plan. It stretches eleven bays wide along its principal facade on South Pennsylvania Street and seven bays along East Maryland Street. The ground floor features a stone entrance way arch of Romanesque form originally flanked by eight storefronts of plate glass between alternating brick piers and iron columns with Corinthian capitals. Except for the projecting corner bays, the upper floors are divided vertically into repetitive bays of Chicago style windows.

Today the building is mixed-use, with several restaurants and bars on the ground-floor level, and offices for Salesforce.com, a San Francisco-based cloud computing company.