So, What is Winston-Salem's Tallest Building SUPPOSED to Look Like?

Three decades ago, famed architect César Pelli revealed plans for a skyscraper that's now an iconic part of a North Carolina city's skyline. Here's what the top is actually meant to resemble. Really.

All skyscrapers are phallic. And then you have Winston-Salem’s tallest skyscraper:

The Wells Fargo Center in Winston-Salem (Photo by James Willamor)

Listen, I know that the Apostle Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians that men should put aside childish things. And yet, if you would like to see exactly how childish men can get, please refer to this Reddit post for a list of the nicknames that people have bestowed upon what’s now officially known as 100 North Main Street (or the Wells Fargo Center). In an effort to keep this extremely serious story—which is posted on a site that’s world-renowned for its sober takes on the most important issues of the day—as safe for work as possible, I will only be posting one of those nicknames in this story. However! You, the cultured and refined reader of the Rabbit Hole, are probably going to make comments. Whatever you do, I implore you not to watch the video below before you do it.

Anyhow, now that we’ve all got this out of our systems, let’s move on. We all know what this building actually looks like. But! What is it supposed to look like? Why did the architects build it that way? And did anyone raise the question: Does anyone else see it, or is it just me?

Case Study: The Gaffney Peachoid

First off, it is entirely possible for serious and/or legendary architects to be at least somewhat blind to the fact that a large, creative, thoughtfully planned and awe-inducing public work could be misinterpreted. Case in point: The Gaffney Peachoid!

A photo of the Peachoid, entitled “Big Ass Peach,” by Gregor Smith (via Flickr)

The Peachoid, a water tower that sits just off of Interstate 85 in South Carolina a few miles south of the state line, was finished in 1981. Many speakers came for the official dedication, including South Carolina governor Dick Riley. The Greenville News’s account of that day mentions the sense of growing pride that rose up in the good people of Gaffney. It said that the tower was already a “talked-about item.” It does not say anything about people referring to it as anything other than a peach.

Who was the first person to note that it resembles a giant butt? In the early 1980s, due to the refreshing lack of social media, it’s impossible to know. However, a year later in 1982, legendary Greensboro newspaper columnist Jerry Bledsoe wrote an item entitled “Gaffney’s Water Tower Looks Anything Like But A Peach.” In it, he noted that travelers were sometimes startled by “a monstrous, vaguely erotic vision looming over the highway.” Bledsoe tried to take the high road, writing that it resembled the rump of a giant pink elephant, or maybe an orange with a green mohawk from a different angle. In any event, he asked his readers to send him letters telling him what they thought it looked like, and if it should have a different name. The next week Bledsoe noted, that most of those letters “can’t be represented here, this being a family newspaper.”

So once the jokes started, what did the good people of Gaffney do? They rolled with it.

I learned this first-hand during my days as a TV reporter in Charlotte. In 2015, my station sent me to Gaffney to shoot and report a story about the Peachoid’s $120,000 repainting. The story is 1:37 long. The first 40 seconds of it is basically a montage of people making butt jokes, set to the dulcet tones of “Peaches” by The Presidents Of The United States of America.

To repeat: They aired that story on broadcast television.

The official stance of Gaffney’s mayor—who himself noted that it does maybe sort of resemble a “part of the human anatomy”—was that as long as people talked about the Peachoid, that was alright with him and other folks in town. Others said the same thing to NPR, which took an extremely Fozzie Bear tone in noting that the tower was often “the butt of jokes.” Even House of Cards did a bit about it in 2013:

The episode and show were so outrageous that a lot of people didn’t even realize the Peachoid was real. “I thought it was just a plot device,” wrote one YouTube commenter last year.

Anyhow, public officials in Gaffney seem to have a sense of humor about their tall, cheeky structure. Winston-Salem? Hard to tell.

How did Winston-Salem get Winston-Salem’d?

You know who could really have let ‘er rip on Winston-Salem’s tallest building? Comedians. And yet Conan O’Brien was relatively wink-wink-nod-nod when he referenced it in a 2020 Get Out The Vote video.

“The last time North Carolina citizens didn’t vote, you got the Winston-Salem building,” O’Brien said. “You want to get that? You want to get Winston-Salem’d this year?”

At this point, I should probably note that it wasn’t voters who Winston-Salem’d Winston-Salem. It was Wachovia.

Remember Wachovia? It was a big bank that failed in 2008 that got its moniker from the name that Moravian settlers gave the area around modern day Winston-Salem. Wells Fargo swallowed it up during the banking crisis. Wachovia had a pretty cool logo. For a bank.

Before it moved to Charlotte after a merger, Wachovia was based in Winston-Salem. And back then, in the early 1990s, executives felt like their current headquarters building was getting old.

One thing that Wachovia folks told the architects was that they didn’t want their new skyscraper to make people feel… small. “They did not want a building that was in any way a monument that was going to overpower people and make them feel put off,” project manager Turan Duda told the Winston-Salem Journal in 1994. “They wanted a building that was friendly, and they used the word friendly several times.”

The architect, César Pelli, was already very well known. Most famously, he’d designed the World Financial Center in New York City, which had several buildings topped with distinct pyramids. He was the architect that designed what’s today known as the Bank of America Corporate Center, which opened in Charlotte in 1992 and remains its tallest building. His firm also designed the Blumenthal Performance Arts Center in Charlotte, which opened in 1987, as well as the Worrell Professional Center in Winston-Salem, which remains the on-campus home of the Wake Forest School of Law. His portfolio was chock full of the world’s tallest and most prominent buildings.

When Wachovia commissioned Pelli to build its new headquarters, the architect thought a lot about the area’s history and style. Stainless steel arcs over the outside doorways were meant to resemble the rounded canopies over Moravian doorways. The building itself was meant to have hints of the Reynolds Building, an old-school Art Deco Winston-Salem skyscraper that inspired the Empire State Building. “When you have a city that does not have a coherent architectural style and you feel as I do that you want to related to the past, we chose the building that has the most character and that was the Reynolds Building,” Pelli told the Winston-Salem Journal. Pelli had spent the previous decade designing buildings that were meant to be pre-Modernist, resembling the skyscrapers of the 1920s and ‘30s. Hence, he did not want anything the looked like the previous Wachovia headquarters, which was rectangular and glass and boring and used to be called “the box that the Reynolds Building came in.”

In particular, Pelli and his architects thought a lot about what the top of the new skyscraper would look like. From the Winston-Salem Journal in 1994:

[Duda] and Pelli experimented with dozens of shapes for the top. They settled on a dome because it gives the most solid image.

“The thing this says about the bank is they did not want the building to look like it was frivolous or extravagant,” Duda said. “Even the top should not look like an afterthought.”

Pelli tried pyramids and even a flat top before he settled on the final design, which would become the only rounded granite dome in the country. Pelli said it was meant to resemble a rose about to bloom. He then let his other architects and engineers figure out how to make it a reality. They built a substructure of metal to hold up thin panels of granite from Sardinia that slid into place. It was six stories in height, which made the 460-foot-tall building the equivalent of 34 stories. When it was finished in early 1996, the building cost $80 million.

So, a few things. One: The top is not waterproof. Two: There’s a hole right at the tip. And three, the building’s owners occasionally let people underneath the dome to take a look around. If it were up to me, I would have built a Space Mountain-style roller coaster in there. Call it the Ric Flair Flyer.

I’ve scoured a portfolio of Pelli buildings to see if any of his other designs even come close to this. The tower that most resembles it is the Zurich Tower in The Hague, which was completed in 1999. That building is more of a hexagon, but it too has a rounded tip at the top, but it’s obviously meant to be metal and not quite as smooth as Winston-Salem’s design.

The Zurich Tower in The Hague (photo via Zairon/Wikimedia Commons)

So yes, there is, quite literally, nothing else like Winston-Salem’s tallest building. “This is not another version of a skyscraper form that exists somewhere else,” Pelli said at the unveiling of a model of the building in 1993.

Okay, but who’s gonna tell him?

It’s very hard to gauge the reaction to the building back then. Mostly, it seems, the bank and others wanted to show their commitment to—and love for—their home city. They crowed about how much better the new headquarters was, with its lobby and gardens (designed by Pelli’s wife). A reporter at the unveiling noted that some people looked at the plans for the building and it took their breath away. Others said it resembled a giant stick of roll-on deodorant. But coverage that the time seems be bathed in pride over an expanding skyline.

Who was the first person to point out that the building may not, in practicality, be interpreted as a rose about to bloom? It’s hard to say. I’ve asked around among longtime reporters and writers, and scoured newspaper archives. Nothing really comes up. Several times over the last few months, I’ve reached out to Turan Duda, an NC State grad who opened his own well-known architecture firm in Durham in 1997. I’ve heard nothing back (which makes me respect him more, honestly). Pelli, who died in 2019, had noted that this building was one of his favorites, but seemed to leave it at that.

It has, however inspired a piece of pop art that you can now buy in town:

winstonsalemmemes

A post shared by @winstonsalemmemes

Jeri Rowe, a longtime reporter and columnist with the Greensboro News & Record who now works as senior writer at High Point University, remembers driving to Winston-Salem after the building was finished. “You would see it on the skyline and be like, what the hell?” he says. It was a good way to get a read on out-of-towners, he says. Some of his friends would see it and say nothing. Others would have an extremely vulgar reaction.

Rowe and I had a long, meandering discussion about why the building’s shape has long been a conversation starter—talked about with a wink and a nod—but hasn’t been the source of a million thinkpieces. “Winston-Salem is a city with a funky vibe, but it’s still in the Bible Belt,” he says. There was no social media horde back then that would have seen the designs for the building and meme-shamed it out of existence (this particular meme, from How I Met Your Mother, is the one I would have chosen). No national columnist or reporter seems to have come to town and made fun of it. In fact, the first local reference I can find in print to the phrase “phallus palace” was in the year 2020, when Journal columnist Scott Sexton wrote a reaction to Conan’s clowning of it. “The Wells Fargo Center is rather distinctive,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, it’s ours.”

So yeah, it’s a unique building. It’s hard to imagine Winston-Salem’s skyline without it. And yes, it looks like the thing that you think it looks like. Whether it makes you swell up with civic pride is entirely up to you.