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Wachovia 48 Story Office Tower & 42 Story Condo Tower

Bled_man

By Bled_man
in Charlotte

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jednc Burg

jednc

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If it were indeed cheaper for a business to exist in a skyscraper, Charlotte would not be sprawed over 280 sq miles and for any one flying over the city its easy to see thousands of 1- 5 story buildings for business. How many 40 story towers do we have? Again the reality speaks for itself.
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Mobuchu Burg

Mobuchu

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Every city in this county, even podunk ones, have bank towers. I can think of little more unremarkable than a bank putting an office tower up in a downtown. By unremarkable, I am using an adjective to refer to a noun unworthy or unlikely to be noticed, especially as being common or ordinary (in the spirit of using Websters to somehow infuse an argument with some sort of merit).

In fact, I can't think of a remarkable city that doesn't have a major downtown office building for its employees, unremarkably.

Banks are not only required to serve their clients and their shareholders. They are also required to serve their communities. To most banks, maintaining jobs in the heart of the city is considered positive for those communities.

Is there a prestige element to creating highly visible and remarkable structures in the symbolic capitals of their communities? Yes. Is there ego in this? No, as corporations do not have egos, ids, or super-egos, as they are institutions, not human brains. Perhaps the CEO has the ego (although the id might be proscribing all of these phallic obsessions).

Corporations do have benefits from prestige as a form of implicit marketing or branding. These banks service significant trusts, foundations, corporations, high net worth individuals. Having a prestigious location instills a sense of the brand that helps to develop the client relationships. My gosh, grocers have it down to a science on what colors, smells, sounds, and product placements create good branding for their stores. Why should banks be any different in concept, when they are selling multi-million dollar services? Certainly going for the 'cheapest' real estate does not instill these types of positive branding experiences into their clients and prospective clients.

Is it remarkable that a bank would build in downtown Charlotte? In Huntersville, where there seems to be surprise that anything positive happens within Charlotte city limits, it might spark conversation. However, in Charlotte, it tends to spark much more conversation that Wachovia (then First Union) located CIC in the boonies in the first place, and not that Wachovia would expand their campus uptown. Most people just find that to be logical and, well, unremarkable.

Philosophically, though, I cannot figure out why any urbanist or environmentalist would ever advocate for sprawling auto-centric suburban campuses without proximity to transit, gridded streets, or residential density. I always figured this to be a consensus ideal. Landscrapers like CIC and IBM-Meridien-Whatever are sprawl, pure and simple.

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OE-305 Whistle-Stop

OE-305

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Does anybody know where they are discarding all of this ground and bedrock? Local quarries could be hurting from a potential flood of aggregate and riff-raff materials into their market. I'm sure some company (like Blue Rhino in Union County perhaps) is using this material/commodity.

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dubone Megalopolis

dubone

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Actually, the debris is pure granite and is going to local quarries, according to Childress Klein. The hole will be 85 feet deep and be 8 stories of parking, 2 stories for truck staging/deliveries, etc., and a basement level for water storage and HVAC equipment as part of the LEED system. They also said that it will pursue LEED Gold, which was a bit of a question mark earlier.

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28202 Whistle-Stop

28202

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If you look closely at Mobuchu's top pic, you can see that S. Tryon is supported by steel beams, topped with timber and overlayed with pavement and concrete sidewalks. I was surprised during explorations yesterday that by the dark of night S. Tryon was removed and revamped over a wooden bridge and is unnoticable if driving the span...

That is one cool hole... near the bottom it is marked as being 600' elevation, looks like the top edge ranges to the 670'/660' height.

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cinco Burg

cinco

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yes, great find, MC. i don't fully understand the perspective... i mean it looks like your looking north from further down s.tryon. i think thats bechtler museum on the left - past the wachovia tower. but from all the renderings and the model this would appear to be sitting on the block wrong. it's probably a rendering from the beginning design phases? no condo tower. none the less - a nice drawing of the building.

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metropolitan Whistle-Stop

metropolitan

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I think that perspective is looking east, down 1st. The building in the foreground looks like the trading floor part of the project, and in the distance that must be the Afr-Am cultural center. The condo tower would be to the left, and not visible. I'm not sure what the two buildings in the extreme foreground are.

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cinco Burg

cinco

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I think that perspective is looking east, down 1st. The building in the foreground looks like the trading floor part of the project, and in the distance that must be the Afr-Am cultural center. The condo tower would be to the left, and not visible. I'm not sure what the two buildings in the extreme foreground are.
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turbocraig Burg

turbocraig

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Not that I put a lot of stock into artists' renderings, but I was at the Main Library today and checked out the Center City Past, Present, and Future exhibit they have on display. It's spread over each level of the library and amounts to little more than various (silent) video snipets, 3-D flyovers, some of which are already outdated, and posters of various downtown projects now or soon to be under construction.

At any rate, on one of the Wachovia South Tryon renderings, there's a shot of the tower viewed from the west. On the ground floor of a building in the foreground (one that doesn't exist on any level) is a 2-story H&M. Beyond that, they also depict the shorter backside of the WB tower (I think this is the section that houses their trading floors... the part with the green roof) as having multi-level retail. There's a Fendi, Motorola store, and some other generic nebulous retail. Lots of signage and the promise of substantial shopping inside.

Not that any of this will be in the finished product, at least that I'm aware of, but it did make for a nice picture.

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uptownliving Town

uptownliving

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I have seen that rendering in the Library as well...it is a fake building they put in there to cover up the existing Duke Energy HQ. Looks like they just pulled a building from Europe and ploped it in there.

Took this photo of the Wachole this weekend. This thing just gets deeper and deeper.

wachhole.jpg

And this view makes it look like these guys are in a strip mine...nope, just the Wachole.

wachconst.jpg

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orulz City

orulz

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I think that perspective is looking east, down 1st. The building in the foreground looks like the trading floor part of the project, and in the distance that must be the Afr-Am cultural center. The condo tower would be to the left, and not visible. I'm not sure what the two buildings in the extreme foreground are.
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uptownliving Town

uptownliving

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Meeting Notice from the Observer. Hope to see some of ya'll there.

People can comment on the Mint Museums' new uptown facility at a public meeting at 7 p.m. today at the Mint Museum of Art, 2730 Randolph Road.

A presentation will include renderings of the planned building on South Tryon Street, the Wachovia cultural complex the Mint will be part of, and details on the collections and programming that will continue at the Randolph Road site.

The Mint Museum of Craft + Design on North Tryon will close, and its collections move to the new building.

The new facility, as well as a new 1,200-seat theater, Bechtler Art Museum and Afro-American Cultural Center, is scheduled to open in 2009.

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