Bank of America Corporate Center

The Bank of America Corporate Center is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed between 1987 and 1988 by César Pelli & Associates, in association with HKS Architects, and built between 1989 and 1992, for a reported $122 million dollars, in Charlotte, NC.

Bank of America Corporate Center 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 Bank of America Corporate Center is also known, or has been known as, Bank of America, or Taj McColl.

Its precise street address is 100 North Tryon Street, Charlotte, NC. You can also find it on the map here.

In 1993 the Bank of America Corporate Center was awarded with the ACEC National Award for Engineering Excellence.

In the building's lobby, there are three frescoes designed by artist Ben Long. Although independent, the three frescoes are interconnected. The artist chose three themes: chaos-creativity, planning-knowledge, and mind-knowledge. Each fresco measures approximately 5.5 by 7 meters..

César Pelli & Associates was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with HKS Architects.

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 Corporate Center a reality:

• Walter P. Moore in charge of Structural Engineering
• McDevitt & Street Company as the Main Contractor
• Curtain Wall Design and Consulting, Inc. in charge of Facade Consultancy
• Otis Elevator Company as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Lincoln Properties Company as the Main Developer
• Ben Long as the collaborating Artist

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

The Bank of America Corporate Center was designed in 1987. At that time Postmodernism was the prevailing style. Fresh, bold and daring, architects were exploring the freedom of designing without having to follow the strict, sometimes arbitrary rules of a specific architectural movement (which ironically became a movement itself). The Bank of America Corporate Center was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The Bank of America Corporate Center uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with reinforced concrete columns and beams.

A framed 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 framed 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 facade system, which by itself would not be cosnidered load-bearing.

Lightweight concrete was used for the floor slabs and beams in order to reduce the weight and achieve the required fire resistance.

Up to the 13th floor, the floor plan is square, but above this level, the base resembles a square placed over a larger cross, with the four corners recessed and the main facades rounded outward. 

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features beige-toned granite covering the perimeter columns and silver-tinted glass floor-to-ceiling windows.

At ground level, the 9.1-meter base is clad in pink granite.

Another material found at the Bank of America Corporate Center is marble, Green marble and patterned marble floors found in the lobby.