Truist Place Building

The Truist Place Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Davis Carter Scott, and built between 1981 and 1983 in Richmond, VA.

Truist Place 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:

• United Virginia Bank Building between 1983 and 1987.
• Crestar Bank Building between 1987 and 1998.
• SunTrust Center / SunTrust Plaza between 1998 and 2021.
• Truist Place from 2021 until this day.

Its precise street address is 919 East Main Street, Richmond, VA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Truist Place Building has received multiple architecture awards for its architectural design since 1983. The following is a list of such prizes and awards:

• BOMA 360
• Place Blue Ribbon in 2021

Truist Place consists of two interconnected buildings and a 12-level parking garage.

Davis Carter Scott was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

The Truist Place Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Truist Place Building was completed in 1983. 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 Truist Place Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The Truist Place Building uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with steel and 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 is non-load bearing either, as it is common in framed tube-in-tube structure type buildings.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features premier gray polished granite cladding with horizontal ribbon-style continuous windows.

Each of the four corners is "folded" inwards in a right angle, creating a double corner.

The building includes a "green roof," installed in 2005, which reduces heat gain, insulates the floor below, and decreases pressure on the stormwater systems. Two beehives have been installed on this roof.