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But some Uptown buildings are more limited. When the Panthers win a game, the top of the building lights up with a big blue “V” for victory.īertges said the color combinations for the Duke Energy Center are seemingly endless. “And when the Panthers score a touchdown, then they can make the building just sparkle and light up.” “We’ll have somebody actually sit up in the press box with our laptop computer,” Bertges said. But when the Carolina Panthers play a night game, someone controls the lights in real time. The colors are usually programmed about a month before an event. Wells Fargo Kate Kopecky, a member of Wells Fargo's lighting committee, works from her home office to program the lights on the Duke Energy Center. They’re also programmed to do something completely random for three minutes at the beginning of each hour that they are lit. They come back on in the early morning before sunrise. “We can make colors run up and down the building and across the building and we can make them sparkle for the Fourth of July,” Bertges said. A computer controls what time the lights turn on and off - and each fixture’s color. So Bertges and the building’s architects and engineers settled on 500 LED light fixtures running the structure’s length. He wanted the new Charlotte skyscraper to connect with the community in the same way. And it would light blue when the weather was going to be good the next day,” Bertges said. “The flame would light red when the weather was going to be bad the next day. The building had a small flame at the top. “This whole project was sort of my little baby,” he said.īertges said he was inspired by the natural gas company where his father worked when Bertges was growing up in Pittsburgh. Bertges retired in 2019 from Wells Fargo, the company that owns the building.
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One of Charlotte’s most recognizable buildings is the Duke Energy Center.īob Bertges said it was his idea to add customizable lights when the building was under construction in the mid- to late 2000s. So I was curious about how or why that happened,” said Jamie Brown, of Mooresville, adding that she probably first noticed the color coordination when the Panthers went to the Super Bowl in 2016.īrown wrote to FAQ City and asked: Who coordinates the lights on Charlotte’s skyscrapers? “I noticed - probably along I-77 when I was driving - that the lights all seemed to be coordinated. If you’ve ever looked at the Charlotte skyline at night, you might have noticed that sometimes all of the buildings are lit up the same color - all red for Valentine’s Day or all blue for a Panthers game.