(Opening spread, left)
a roundel portrait of
Lorenzo de' Medici in
the Bruges branch of
the family bank
(Opening spread, right)
Alex Schaefer's plein air
paintings of Chase Bank
branches in flames have
attracted the attention
of the policeince the early 1970s ther e has been
a decisive turn from representational
architecture in certain sectors
of society in which it had once
predominated. vVhile corporations continued
to commission distinctive headquart ers;
hospitals, social housing (to the extent that
it was built at all) and even government
b uildings have, on the whole, r ejected
presence in favour of a certain abjectness
of both ambition and execution. That this is
a consequence of Thatcherite-Reaganite
ideology is fairly obvious : given the ultimate
causes of this race to the bottom, it is
appropriate then that banks should be
the bearers of the winner's trophy.
All are fa1niliar with the utter
phen omenological 1nisery conjured by
a visit to a high-street bank today, with t heir
threadbare carpets, strip lights, battered false
'Banks for public
use often opened
onto the street,
in the manner of
any other early
modern shop'
ceilings and (hardly surprising, this) s ullen
st aff. By contrast , the banks of the Victorian
era - now frequently preserved for posterity,
in the OK at least, by the benevolen ce of
Mr JD Wetherspoon - are A.laddin's caves
of mass-produced ornament. The recent
parsjmony of these jnstitutions has doubtless
improved their profit margins but it has
rendered the lives of all those who have
to use them more unpleasant in the process.
With this hair-shirt tendency, banking
returns to its origins (albeit for quite different
r easons). The moral opprobrium under which
the practice originated dictated a lightness
of equipment suitable for quick getaways and
an unobtrusive modesty unlikely to arouse
censure. The English word 'bank' and its
European cognat es derive from the Italian
word banchi, the trestle tables that were the
essential piece of kit in the early banker's(This page, clockwise from
top left) a Roman money
changer at his bench;
Hiroshige Ill's late 1870s
print showing the recently
completed First National
Bank of Japan,
a syncretistic building that
housed the first modern,
joint-stock bank in the
country; 16th-century
German banker Jakob
Fugger and his accountant
Matthaus Schwarzarsenal. These banchi were first set up in the
loggias of the palazzi della 1·agione, combined
law courts and town halls, of Tuscan towns
in the 14th century. "\¥hile P evsner expands
his investigation of the type t o incorporat e
exchanges, here I will stick to buildings that
centre on the transaction across the t eller's
desk, or its automatic replacement (which
also means head offices are out). There are
further distinctions to b e made within this
category, such as r et ail or private banks,
merchant banks and central banks, and so on.
Information r egarding the architectural
settings in which modern banking ·v;ras born
is spar se. The Medici had a network of banks
spread throughout Western Europe, but only
one of these b uildings survives outside Italy.
Hof Bladelin in Bruges, pur chased under the
auspices of their charismatic and ultimately
disastrous agent Tommaso Portinari,