The City Duma building, to which the tower adjoins, has been rebuilt many times and now looks completely different than in the first years of its existence. But the tower itself has remained unchanged. It was designed by Italian Giacomo Ferrari. This architectural decoration was a distinctive feature of many city halls in Europe, but Ferrari's creation had its own peculiarity - the tower seemed to be adjacent to the building from the side, and not towering above him.

The style of the vertical dominant of Nevsky Prospekt is classicism. The Duma Tower has an unusual pentagonal shape and several tiers in height, the penultimate (the last one according to Ferrari's idea) is decorated with a clock.

In the 1830s, the tower was completed and finally acquired its current appearance with the last wooden tier and metal decoration at the top.

The tower clock mechanism has repeatedly broken down, most recently in 2007, it had to be stopped altogether. On November 12, 2014, on the birthday of Sberbank, which now occupies the building of the former City Duma, the clock was rewound, so it now shows the exact Moscow time.