The Drake Observatory, located between the 17th and 18th holes on Waveland Golf Course, is perhaps the most unusual of six local buildings featured in three-minute videos produced by the Iowa Architectural Foundation. 

The videos are the brainchild of IAF Executive Director Claudia Cackler, who said, “The Greater Des Moines area has a significant architecture portfolio and it inspired us to create videos that would take viewers into the interiors of six amazing buildings.” 

Find the videos on YouTube by searching under the keyword “ArchiTreasures” and the structures’ names. 

Cackler said she wanted to tell compelling stories using varying perspectives, including personal recollections and even a child’s point of view for the observatory. 

Built in 1921, the observatory houses a telescope given to Drake University in 1894 by the school’s founder and endower, Francis M. Drake, the child narrator explains.

She adds that  Drake astronomy professor Daniel Morehouse, who discovered Comet Morehouse in 1908, moved the telescope to Waveland because it was the highest elevation in the city at that time and had less interference from the growing number of electric lights. 

Other ArchiTreasure videos feature:

• The Iowa Capitol, built between 1871 and 1886. It is “the only five-domed capitol in the country,” narrator Jeff Kane notes as the camera begins a breathtaking trip that few Iowans have made to the top of the gold-leafed dome’s interior. 

  The 298-step climb passes a “whispering gallery” where it is possible to eavesdrop on conversations of ant-sized people in the rotunda below. From there, the path winds around inside the dome before reaching the finial cap with windows that provide spacious views beyond the State Fairgrounds on the east and the Art Center on the west.   

• Watson Powell’s American Republic downtown building and campus, completed in 1965 by Skidmore Owings Merrill architect Gordon Bunshaft. Narration is by Business Publications owner Connie Wimer, who explains, “I was privileged to know Watson Powell.” 

  While images of artwork, architecture and sculpture pass before the camera, Wimer recalls, “Watson was a very tall, very elegant man. He had a great vision for the building, both inside and out. The eight-story, steel-and-concrete structure is the epitome of clean lines. It is straight out of ‘Mad Men’ with minimal internal structure. … The final product was a blank slate to house the marvelous collection of art amassed by Powell after he immersed himself in a six-month crash course on modern art.”

• The Polk County Courthouse “has had many lives,” narrator Jeff Kane begins in another video. First as a small brick structure in 1848, then a modest building in the late 1800s and finally the 1906 beaux-arts giant it is today, complete with a clock tower and recently restored to “grow into a new era.”

  “Within these walls, there’s over a century of history,” Kane adds, as the camera highlights “honey-colored hardwood podiums, satin-stained seats, delicate wallpaper … secret chambers [and] hefty, yet subtle, double-hinged doors.”

• The building that now houses U.S. Bank a block north of the courthouse is “one of the most outstanding examples of commercial art deco in the country,” says IAF trustee Linh Huynh in the next video. Completed in 1932 for the Iowa Des Moines National Bank, U.S. Bank is now in the elegant second-floor banking lobby. 

  Plans called for a 21-story skyscraper, but the project was capped at five stories during the Great Depression. Although the video does not mention this, plans for the tower that was never built were repurposed to become the 14-story Des Moines Building, a block north at Sixth Avenue and Locust Street.

• The Masonic Temple at 10th Street and Grand Avenue was built in 1913 and refashioned in 2002 as the Temple for Performing Arts by developer/philanthropists Harry and Pam Bookey.

  Huyhn describes the temple as “an urban victory” and “a cultural hub giving students and adults a place to gather and make music, watch theater and dine.”

IAF chief Cackler said three new videos are in progress and will be available on YouTube later this spring.