Monuments to Money: The Architecture of American Banks

by Charles Belfoure

To understand the evolution of bank design, it is also necessary to grasp the fundamentals of America’s banking and financial history, which go hand-in-hand with the creation of bank architecture. While the worldwide evolution of architectural styles played a major factor in the way banks look, developments in the financial history of the nation—depressions, panics, government monetary and banking policy—also played a critical role. With more than 200 photographs and illustrations, this work studies the evolution of American bank architecture from 1781 (when America’s first bank was founded) to new banks of the present day. It explores how and why the classically inspired structures built in late 18th century America, embodying strength and trust, evolved into the essentially anonymous bank buildings of today.

Genres: Architecture

358 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2005

About the author

Charles Belfoure is the New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Architect, House of Thieves and The Fallen Architect. An architect by profession, he graduated from the Pratt Institute and Columbia University, and he taught at Pratt as well as Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. His area of specialty is historic preservation. In addition to his historical fiction, Belfoure is also the award-winning author of several architectural histories, and has been a freelance writer for The Baltimore Sun and The New York Times. He lives in Westminster, Maryland.

source: Amazon

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a singular book that needed to be written. American banks hold a peculiar place in American city-building and American architecture. It was William STrickland's Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia which inaugurated the Greek Revival in 1820. It was WIlliam Lescaze and George Howe's Philadelphia Savings Fund Society in 1932 that inaugurated American modernism. Skidmore Ownings and Merrill's One Chase Plaza of 1960 was the peak of high modernism and began the tradition of urban plazas attached to buildings. In between, banks were often the tallest and most notable buildings in major cities, and, almost inevitably, they were the most important commercial building in small towns.

Banks had peculiar needs, from an overwhelming desire for sunlight in early years to help tellers read checks and deter forgeries, to the demand for safety, especially around vaults, to the need to both welcome in the public and keep employees separate. Some states even supervised how much banks could spend on their main building, for fear of locking up too much of their funds in a single structure. All of this led to peculiar creativity and inventiveness. Many firms became design-build bank specialists, such as Hoggson Brothers and Tilghman Moyer Company in the late 19th century, or Alfred Bossom and York & Sawyer later with their palazzo Italian classicism or Walker & Gillette with their stripped classicism in the late 1920s. There were even specialists in bank metalwork, especially for tellers' screens and check tables, such as Samuel Yellin, a Polish-born Philadelphian, and bank vaults, such as the Diebold Company, which created both safety and elaborate designs when vaults were usually kept in full view of the clientele. Banks' importance in the urban fabric is even more notable because so many of them created the financing to help build the cities that surrounded them.

The book can often descend into just list of individual banks, with their pilasters, cornices, engaged columns, rusticated stones, and so forth described, even if they are sometimes not pictured. But on the whole this is a necessary and important addition to the oeuvre of both urban and banking history.

[Sue Ann Painter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent presentation of the evolution of bank design and aesthetics in U.S. Belfoure places the buildings in context of local and national economic history. Not an easy subject but he has consulted reliable primary sources and makes skillful use of them. Good illustrations and graphic design. A pleasure to read.