Bad vibes in Bishopsgate

When ABN Amro finished moving into its impressive new offices in Spitalfields on the edge of the City of London last month, something was missing. It's true the building has the vast trading floors, glass lifts and state-of-the art trading technology that every big institution likes to flaunt. It also has a rather swanky foyer, a full three floors high, from which escalators lead up to the trading floors.

But what that grand foyer lacks is a piece of artwork to match the great steel blob that ABN's deadly rival Deutsche has placed in the visitors' area to its own new building in London Wall. At the moment all the Dutch bank has to offer is a rather strange wall-mounted sculpture that looks like a series of partly melted rubbish bins painted different colours.

That, it turns out, is exactly what it is. Traders at the bank are less than impressed with "the bins". And health and safety officials fear that the sculpture would give off noxious fumes in the event of a fire. They may even order it to be removed.

But ABN Amro may have something up its sleeve. The inspiration comes from a feng shui consultant who was asked to give his professional opinion of the new Bishopsgate building while it was under construction. Not bad, he said, but he was concerned about the angular feature pointing out above the entrance. He believed that it could have a very bad effect on anyone it pointed towards.

The offending feature in fact points straight towards the offices of Greenwich NatWest (NatWest Markets when the ABN Amro building was going up). And as one can well imagine, the kind-hearted folk at ABN Amro were most distressed when, soon afterwards, an evil spirit descended on the house of Martin Owen in the form of a black hole in the firm's equity derivatives book.

By this stage, the building was already in an advanced stage of construction and it was far too late to change the design to something less malign. But ABN Amro's top brass haven't forgotten the alternative remedy suggested by the feng shui sage. He said the evil effects of the architecture could be mitigated by having water flowing into the building.

So a senior figure at ABN Amro reckons that a good way to fill the cavernous space of the foyer would be to install some kind of fountain. That would restore the balance of yin and yang in the building and save the outside world from its evil vibes. But, then again, since the buttress also points in the general direction of Deutsche Bank's new building, perhaps they'll just leave it as it is. Michael Peterson