Bank of America Plaza

The Bank of America Plaza is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates, and built between 1991 and 1992, for a reported $150 million dollars, in Atlanta, GA.

Bank of America Plaza is not the only name you might know this building by though. Between 1992 and 1998 it was also known as NationsBank Plaza C&S Plaza.

Its precise street address is 600 Peachtree Street NE, Atlanta, GA. You can also find it on the map here.

In 2018 the Bank of America Plaza was awarded with the BOMA TOBY Award.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 2016 and 2024.

Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Bank of America Plaza a reality:

• CBM Engineers Inc. in charge of Structural Engineering
• Beers Construction as the Main Contractor
• Otis Elevator Company as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Cousins Properties as the Main Developer
• Environmental Systems Design, Inc. in charge of MEP Engineering

The Bank of America Plaza can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Bank of America Plaza was completed in 1992. By 1992 the Postmodernism movement was experiencing a transition. Critics argued that Postmodernism, initially a rebellious and innovative style, had become formulaic and commercialized, and so the trend started moving away from blending historical styles, irony, and playful ornamentation, and begun to give way to emerging architectural trends concerned with more present matters such as technology, ecology or sustainability.

The Bank of America Plaza uses a trussed tube-in-tube structure , with steel columns and concrete and steel slabs.

A trussed tube-in-tube structure uses a central core, known as inner tube, which usually holds stairs, lifts and installations, and a perimeter of columns around it, which form the exterior tube. The interior tube is tipically more massive (often made of reinforced concrete), and the exterior tube is "lighter" (made of steel or concrete columns). Both tubes are conencted via horizontal elements which make up the floors and also transmit any horizontal froces from the facade to the core.

The facade of the building is load bearing. This is a direct consequence of the integration of the exterior "tube" into the facade, something which most trussed tube-in-tube buildings do in order to liberate the interior space from structural elements and achieve a more flexible interior.

So the facade of the builing is techinically load-bearing, yes, however, in between the load-bearing colums we find a curtain-wall type of facade, which by itself would not be cosnidered load-bearing.

The central core features a trussed geometry, also contributing to the stiffness of the overall structure

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features black-glass windows and red granite cladding, creating a pattern of vertical stripes that heavily accentuate the verticality of the building.

At ground level most of the marble stripes disappear, creating an illusion of lightness, but at the same time the marble also takes a more prominent spot by cladding the 3-story high arches that form the entrances to the building.