All his work for NFL teams are inside jobs.

• Position: People

The job market was dire when David Wagner graduated with a bachelor's in architecture from Virginia Tech in 1974. "You flat out couldn't get a job," he says.

With no prospects in or around his native Pittsburgh, Wagner relentlessly pursued a meeting with Charlotte architect Harry Wolf, whose work he admired. "I flew into Charlotte on a DC-9 prop plane. I couldn't find a restaurant in downtown Charlotte because there were none. I kept thinking, 'Why would I leave Pittsburgh for this backward Southern town?'"

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A paycheck was reason enough. He spent the first six years of his career with Wolf Associates and never left the Queen City. After working as a principal with Clark Tribble Harris and Li Architects, he formed Wagner Murray Architects in 1990 and has helped transform Charlotte into an urban center. His imprint is on a new $75 million park, retail and office project for Wachovia and the Levine Museum of the New South.

His big break came in the late '80s, when he designed the headquarters of Spartan Food Systems in Spartanburg, S.C. Spartan was owned by Jerry Richardson, who would win permission from the National Football League in 1993 to start the Carolina Panthers. One of Richardson's first moves was to hire Wagner to design part of what is now Bank of America Stadium. While HOK Inc...