[plinko]

Built as the headquarters tower for Nations Bank as a symbol of Charlotte's rise in the national banking industry, the tower topped the skyline by nearly 300'.

Cesar Pelli here took a number of facade and massing cues from other towers he designed in that era and topped it with an epic almost gothic cap of shards and spikes. The result is a tower the soars upward and culminates with a very iconic crowning of the queen city of the South.

The tower is probably the best of Pelli's work of the era (along with Society Center) and catapulted Charlotte's skyline from rather blah and stumpy to decidedly more interesting.