Paragon Prairie Tower

Paragon Prairie Tower
Mosaic prairie to encircle metro office park beacon

Urbandale will soon be home to an unusual artwork that builders say will be the largest mosaic glass tile mural in the United States.

Workers are now wrapping a 5,000-square-foot scene of an Iowa prairie around a 120-foot tall tower located at the entrance to R&R Realty Group's new Paragon Office Park at 123rd Street and Meredith Drive in Urbandale.
Craftsmen are attaching nearly two million pieces of colored Italian glass in a year-long project that melds art and engineering with high-tech tile manufacturing.
The Paragon Prairie Tower will "look like a watercolor painting" when seen from Interstate Highway 35/80, but will actually comprise individual tiles that are each less than 1 square inch, said Des Moines artist David Dahlquist, who designed the image on the tower and helped oversee manufacture of the glass tiles in Ravenna, Italy.

The tower will cost an estimated $1 million to create, according to R&R President Daniel Rupprecht.

It is "a tribute to Iowa and Iowans," Rupprecht has said. "We intended for it to draw businesses to the Paragon Office Park, but also be a visual reminder of our Iowa heritage."
Office parks frequently offer amenities, including outdoor sculptures, corporate lakes and other park-like features to attract tenants. Some also employ visually iconic structures, ranging from giant signs to oversized architectural features that can serve as landmarks to help guide potential clients to a particular location.
But the Paragon tower will be more than a commercial landmark, Dahlquist said. At the center of the state north of the juncture of two interstate highways, it will be "a cultural landmark for the state of Iowa," he said.

By week's end, workers at the tower were nearly a third of the way up in applying 1-foot-square sheets of tile to the tower. Each sheet contains 144 individual pieces of glass tile that were prearranged by Italian tile manufacturer Sicis to create a prairie image that includes grass, wheat and corn.
Artisans from Des Moines Marble and Mantel expect to complete the installation in early July, said Steve Bennett, president of Construction Services Inc., an R&R subsidiary that's overseeing construction of the office park.

The 120-foot tower is 16 feet in diameter, creating an exterior circumference of about 50 feet.

A mobile scaffolding system is hung from the top of the tower and was designed specifically for this project, Bennett said. The scaffold is powered by four motors at the top of the tower so it can be raised and lowered as different phases of work on the tower progress.
Each piece of glass tile was colored at the factory in Italy and assembled by a computer into 1-foot-square sheets, which when properly applied to the tower, will reproduce the prairie image created by Dahlquist.
The 1-foot-square sheets were carefully packaged and numbered so that when they were unloaded in Urbandale, the craftsmen installing the tile just needed to follow directions and install the sheets in the proper order, working clockwise around the tower.
Installing the tile is an art of its own, Dahlquist said, because tolerances for how much grout can be placed between individual sheets of tile are very small.

The tower is visible to motorists as they round the northwest corner of Interstate 35/80 and begin heading south. It also can be seen by motorists headed south on Iowa Highway 141 a mile or two before that highway joins the interstate.

Follow this link in order to view the Paragon Prairie Tower Website

All the tiles of the Prairie Tower are from the Art Factory



SICIS