In early 1959, the world-renowned architect Edward Durell Stone formally abandoned the International Style of modern architecture with the unveiling of the new U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India. Commenting on the new face of the America overseas, Frank Lloyd Wright declared: “It’s the only embassy that does credit to the United States.” Although very well received both then and now, it also put him on a path that would distance him from his peers in the community.

The inspiration for the North Carolina’s new Legislative Building came directly from the new embassy. At the time, the style was labeled as “Decorative Romanticism” and was a lightning rod for attention, both then and now.

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The gem on Hillsborough St. in 1962 — at night, the way Joe Cox intended it. (Photo courtesy the NC Office of  Archives and History, State Archives.)

Forty-seven years ago next month, Branch Banking and Trust Company  opened its  “State College Office” at the corner of Hillsborough St. and Oberlin Rd. The ribbon cutting ceremony was held with great fanfare, with the mayor of Raleigh, the chancellor of NC State and the president of BB&T in attendance.

Though the pick and shovel groundbreaking had occurred several months earlier, the bank’s opening “broke ground” in another, more significant way — it was the first Raleigh bank to feature a work of public art as an integral part of its design — a dazzling stained glass mural.

“The mural represents the growing cooperation between artist and architect that is rapidly spreading throughout the country,” the N&O reported in an article on the event in 1962.

The architect of the State College Office was F. Carter Williams; the artist who designed the stained glass mural was none other than the renowned Raleigh artist, color theorist and School of Design professor, Joe Cox.

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On Caswell Square (one of the five original public spaces on the 1792 plan for Raleigh) and adjacent to the Oral Hygiene Building lies an overlooked gem of late Victorian Raleigh architecture; the NC School for the Blind and Deaf. With the destruction of ‘Raleigh’s Own Castle‘ in 1967 and later the Park Hotel in 1975, this structure stands with the former Leonard Medical School building as one of the last two remaining examples of turreted public buildings in the area.

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