Nashville Skyline

The AT&T Building has been the tallest in Tennessee since 1994, and nobody in Nashville calls it anything but the Batman Building — the two spires on its crown read unmistakably as ears. They are not decorative: they are communications masts, which is the whole purpose of the building, and the shape follows from the function.

It is the single most identifiable element in the skyline, and the reason a Nashville model is recognisable to people who could not name another building in the city.

Nashville has added more tall buildings in the past decade than in the several before it. The downtown and the SoBro district across from the arena have been under more or less continuous construction, and the skyline a visitor photographed five years ago is materially different from today's.

That is a real problem for a physical model, and the honest answer is that it has a date. We re-cut Nashville as the skyline changes rather than shipping a silhouette that quietly stopped being accurate — a maintenance burden that simply does not exist for Cleveland or Philadelphia.

The AT&T Building leads with its two communications spires. The Pinnacle at Symphony Place sits beside it with a sloped glass crown, and Fifth Third Center and the Bridgestone Tower fill the middle of the cluster.

Across the river the Nissan Stadium edge marks the east bank, and the lower run of Broadway honky-tonks sits beneath the towers — low, dense and the actual reason most people come to Nashville. The model keeps that low strip rather than cropping to the tall buildings, because a Nashville skyline without Lower Broad underneath it is just another mid-size American downtown.