It is a 12-story, steel-framed building sheathed in a smooth, unornamented shell of gold-colored brick, black steel and glass.

Its slender volume rises 157 feet from the sidewalk to the twelfth-floor penthouse, which once served as the office of the building's prominent patron, Oscar Nelson (1879-1953).

Mr. Nelson, president of the United Carbon Company, commissioned architect Walter F. Martens to design the structure.

The building was commissioned in 1939 as the national headquarters for the United Carbon Company, which occupied the ninth through the twelfth floors until 1950.

This article about a property in Kanawha County, West Virginia on the National Register of Historic Places is a stub.