Bank of America Building

The Bank of America Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Taylor & Fisher, in association with Smith & May, and built between 1928 and 1929, for a reported $3.00 million dollars, in Baltimore, MD.

Bank of America Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Baltimore Trust Company Building between 1929 and 1933.
• Mathieson Building between 1940 and 1960.
• Maryland National Bank Building between 1961 and 1993.
• NationsBank Building between 1993 and 1997.
• Bank of America Building from 1997 until this day.
• 10 Light Street from 2012 until this day.

Its precise street address is 10 Light Street, Baltimore, MD. You can also find it on the map here.

The Bank of America Building has received multiple architecture awards for its architectural design since 1929. The following is a list of such prizes and awards:

• ULI Wavemaker Award in 2016
• Historic Preservation in 2017
• AIA MD Award

At the time of its inauguration, the Bank of America Building was the tallest building south of New York.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2012 and 2015. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was BCT Design Group.

Taylor & Fisher was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Smith & May.

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 Building a reality:

• Girard Engineering, Inc. in charge of Structural Engineering
• J.Henry Miller & Son as the Main Developer
• Hildreth Meiere, Griffith Baily Coale, and McGill Mackall as the collaborating Artist

The Bank of America Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Bank of America Building was completed in 1929, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Bank of America Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features dark-brown bricks with Indiana limestone at the coronation of the building and the setbacks. The limestone is adorned with carved symbols referencing the building's values,

The central tower is topped off with a hipped copper and gold roof.