Money Matters: A Critical Look at Bank Architecture

Storefront cash machines and drive-in tellers dominate the landscape of banking these days, but it wasn't always that way. Money Matters: A Critical Look at Bank Architecture presents the grandeur of bank architecture in the A United States and Canada as it evolved over two centuries.

With more than 150 black-and-white and color photographs, Money Matters is the first exhibition to survey the history and cultural significance of bank architecture as a genre. Included are examples of banks by such notable architects and firms as Benjamin Latrobe; McKim, Mead & White; Louis Sullivan; Mies Van Der Rohe, and Philip Johnson. It will be on view in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery.

Co-organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Tex., and Parnassus Foundation, the exhibition includes photographs of 56 banks, dating from the late 18th century to today. A selection of historical photographs by Berenice Abbott, Charles Pratt, Paul Strand and John Szarkowski complement recently commissioned works by 11 photographers from the United States and Canada: Robert Bourdeau, Marilyn Bridges, Edward Burtynsky, David Duchow, Serge Hambourg, James Iska, Len Jenshel, David Miller, John Pfahl, George Tice and Catherine Wagner.

"Bank architecture has conveyed a grandeur and stability essential to an industry that relies as much on public trust and confidence as hard-earned dollars," says Barry Bergdoll, who has coordinated and installed the exhibition at Columbia. While architecture has played a fundamental role in establishing banks as "august and trusted guardians of wealth," said Professor Bergdoll, the exhibition also reveals "the complex range of attitudes we hold as individuals and as a society to money."

From humble structures to soaring towers, with some as commanding as Greek temples or Renaissance palazzi, the banks photographed include the First Bank of the United States, Philadelphia, 1795-97 (designed by Samuel Blodgett); the Bank of Louisville, 1835 (James Dakin); National Farmers' Bank, now Norwest Bank, Owatonna, Minn., 1907 (Louis Sullivan); National city Bank (now citibank), New York, 1908 (McKim, Mead & White); Toronto-Dominion Bank, 1964 (Mies Van Der Rohe); and RepublicBank Center, now NCB, Houston, 1984 (Philip Johnson).

The exhibition is presented chronologically with outstanding examples from 200 years of architectural style: Federal and Greek Revival, Georgian, Victorian, Beaux-Arts, International Modern, and Postmodern. Also represented are such innovative experiments as the Prairie Style banks of Louis Sullivan and his followers and the first banks built in this century in which the traditional design—the bank as vault or temple—was replaced by the corporate glass tower.

In an introduction to the exhibition, Professor Bergdoll writes, "For bankers and their architects, style was but one of the variables to consider as they erected buildings to promote their business. Was banking to be portrayed as conservative or in the vanguard? Should a bank convey aloofness and reasoned caution or friendliness and entrepreneurial innovation? No matter what decisions were reached, the bank had to maintain its vital aura and stage itself with the utmost care in public space."

An illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition. A book with the same title as the exhibition, published in 1990 by McGraw-Hill Inc. in association with The Museum of Fine Arts and Parnassus Foundation, reproduces many of the photographs and includes an extensive historical survey by architectural historian Susan Wagg and essays by Brendan Gill, architectural critic of The New Yorker; Robert Nisbet, sociologist and Columbia professor emeritus, and Anne Tucker, curator of photography at the Houston museum and curator of the exhibition.

First shown in Houston, "Money Matters" has traveled to the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, the Chicago Historical Society, the Vancouver Museum, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.