Located at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Church Street, the Fifth Third Center is a Class A, 490,281-square-foot office tower that has a great past and an even greater future. The 31-story (490-feet) building was designed by Eugene Kohn, principal of world-renowned architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox, and completed in 1986. Its amenities include Starbucks, Jimmy Johns, Fifth Third Bank, Cherry Street Eatery & Sweetery and on-site 24-hour security. The building also has a covered walkway to The Nashville City Club, downtown Nashville’s only elite business club.
It serves as the Nashville headquarters for Fifth Third Bank, Loews Hotel Shared Services and many other businesses and was the tallest building in Nashville before the AT&T building was completed in 1994.
Metro DES has cooled the building since it opened. The building’s chief engineer, Layman Harris, commented, “We both expect and receive a very high level of reliability from DES on the chilled water system. On the few occasions that there been concerns, they were very quick to respond, and they do an outstanding job of coordinating pre-planned outages with us as a customer.”
While Fifth Third Center may be considered a postmodern skyscraper, its architects conceived the building as an extension of Nashville’s rich architectural heritage. The building’s design blended classical elements from William Stricklan’s Downtown Presbyterian Church across the street with modern materials. The church’s influence can be most easily seen in the two towerlike structures designed to reflect the double-steeple configuration of the church and the repeating Egyptian revival columns used on both the interior and exterior of the tower. It has also undergone renovations to its plaza, building entrance, lobby, elevators, multitenanted-floor elevator lobbies and restrooms to maintain its status as one of Nashville’s premier office buildings.
