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Sir Norman Foster is not famous for understated buildings: he’s responsible for the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank in Hong Kong, the huge radio aerial outside Barcelona, and the redevelopment of the Reichstag in Berlin. Commerzbank’s new building in Frankfurt will be Europe’s tallest. But its architects, Sir Norman Foster & Partners, insist that winning a height competition isn’t the point. Banks are no longer seeking to outreach each other in opulence. They’re looking for an efficient use of space. Barclays’ new headquarters, in the City of London’s Lombard Street, follows this principle. It says nothing specific about Barclays it could as easily house any other bank or a blue-chip company for that matter. Today, grand design has been replaced by functional business support. The trend is for architects of banks in Europe and the US to give as much consideration to the needs of the profit-makers inside as to bending the necks of customers and passers-by outside. The landmark design in this trend, years ahead of its time when it was finished in the 1980s, was ING Bank’s quirky headquarters in Amsterdam, extraordinary to behold, but kind to its inhabitants. So what has happened to the old-style megaliths, conceived in the 1980s? The redevelopment of Peterborough Court, Fleet Street, home of Goldman Sachs in London, is a good example of power-style. Never mind the vast cylindrical columns that face you in the front entrance or the rectilinear patterns of the glass and steel lobby walls. It is the elevators themselves that tell the tale. Horizontal steel straps on the inside doors, echoing the lobby motif and fixed solidly in place with exposed bolts, work their magic as the doors shut silently, but firmly. The passenger is enthralled by the building’s palpable strength. In this edifice, which serves as Goldman’s European headquarters, the medium is indisputably the message. The building speaks of power, of deal-flow, of secret knowledge. “‘Muscular’ is how a lot of people describe it,” a receptionist confides. Some grand bank buildings belie the troubled present state of their occupants. In Paris, Crédit Lyonnais, the subject of an multi-billion dollar government bail-out, has created a new building at Bercy Expo resembling nothing less than a cathedral. In London, Nomura Securities moved into 1 St Martin’s-le-Grand, once the headquarters of the General Post Office (GPO), only months before Nomura’s president in Japan, Yoshihisa Tabuchi, was forced to resign after a share-support scandal. Not that Tabuchi didn’t leave his mark on the sumptuously restyled Nomura House. In a private executive dining room he installed a circular stained-glass window that was seen only by the bank’s most important visitors. Also in London is the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development, a magnificent monument to the ego of Jacques Attali, the bank’s disgraced former president. Attali ordered rough-hewn marble slabs from the quarries of Carrara in Italy. It was message overkill the bank was not in financial difficulties, but its building caused it no end of public relations grief. The London offices of Daiwa Europe, which is unconnected with the scandal-stained Daiwa Bank, are in the opulent turn-of-the-century Phoenix Assurance building on King William Street. The lobby is a grand affair of patterned marble with an octagonal middle formed by marble pillars and a spectacular chandelier hanging from a translucent dome. But Daiwa Europe is following the trend to more functionality. Construction is under way of a new building of glass, metal and stone (designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership, famous for the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Lloyd’s of London building) on the corner of London Wall and Wood Street. The building, due to be completed in 1998, will be stepped back in three stages, with the tallest section 15 storeys high, with roof gardens. It might be impressive, but it will be functional, and won’t be opulent. Adaptable outlook
Opulence is obsolete. When it comes to modern bank architecture there are two things that matter adaptability and utility. Banking business is constantly changing, so the buildings must be readily adaptable. Banks also need large areas for trading floors, which is partly why many new buildings have their elevators and other services on the outside edges rather than in the middle. But adaptability also suits Anglo-Saxon property speculators, who insist that even banks be housed in “signature” buildings with resale potential. Barclays contracted for just such a structure when it tore down its old headquarters at The drive for flexibility and saleability has influenced style. But style as a projection of corporate image is mostly seen in publicly visible places the building’s exterior, lobbies and, of course, the executive suites where visitors are entertained. The rest of these buildings are essentially warehouse-like shells for trading, settlement and corporate finance. The drive toward functionality has undoubtedly influenced the use of materials. Gilding, crystal and the injudicious use of marble are out; stone, wood and base metals are in. JP Morgan’s London building, in the old City of London School, incorporates a modern version of an Italian piazza. The interior is a simple, dry-wall affair and, says an admiring architect, the structure is “very undemanding”. Space can be rearranged easily. “What’s interesting about JP Morgan,” says the architect, “is the extreme modesty of the building. Even the boardroom is not extravagant.” Barclays has also downplayed the glitz. The sumptuous “golden gates” that used to guard the entrances to its old headquarters have been quietly removed from their original position. One pair of them hangs inconspicuously on the high walls on either side of the Gracechurch Street entrance, but they have been allowed to develop an understated bronze patina. Unless you cast your eye upwards and sideways on the way in you don’t see them; the other pair is in storage. “They are very keen not to have that image [of golden gates] now,” says Terry Brown of architects GMW which designed the new headquarters. “One brief for 54 Lombard Street was that it should be operationally to a very high standard and that it should reflect that on the outside. They are escaping from the grand imagery. The idea is to convey that money is being spent to support an efficient business.” Even among Paris banks whose middle name is grandiosity, says one British architect the emphasis has changed to the sleek, light and functional. Three major banks, Banque Paribas, Société Générale and Banque Indosuez, are involved in rehousing themselves in modern buildings where space is moveable and no-one, bar traders, is far from a window. Société Générale has already moved to a twin-towered affair in La Défense and is now totally refitting the building to make better use of the space. Paribas is not likely to give up its famous Orangerie, but its traders, who now work above the lovely courtyard, will eventually be moved to more functional quarters in a new building on the site of an old garage. But the French are not totally forsaking grandeur. The lobby of the new SocGen building is three storeys high, all marble and glass, and there is a metal sculpture in the middle with a pool of water beneath it. Light pours in from a huge glass dome at the top. “When you are in the entrance you have a feeling of power, a lot of power,” sighs a French architect. That discreet commodity, power, is expressed in many ways. The Bank of China’s building in Hong Kong is downright threatening. One of its triangular knife-edges points directly to the governor’s mansion and the two poles at the top resemble chopsticks in a rice bowl, sticking straight up. This, say the practitioners of fengshui (the Chinese system based on energy flow used to position buildings propitiously), signifies death. Local gossip says the bank may be built on a stream, which is bad fengshui especially for a bank: it means that the money “will run out of your house”. A new approach When the HSBC building opened in 1985, the then deputy chairman William Purves made no bones about it. The structure, he declared, was a “factory containing all the plant and machinery required to conduct our business”. It was the most expensive factory ever built. But the build-higher competition, which is reaching frenzied proportions in south-east Asia, may finally be dying out in Europe and America, Canary Wharf notwithstanding. Norman Foster’s new Commerzbank building, scheduled for completion in 1997, is 254 metres high. But it is high not because of a desire to express power so much as to take best advantage of space. The building is being constructed next to the existing Commerzbank tower opposite the Frankfurter Hof in downtown Frankfurt. Despite its great height it has features which soften and shape the building: there are the curved lines of the triangular exterior and gardens that spiral up and around the building. It is intended to be an assemblage of small villages with sky-gardens 50 storeys high. “I think the days of height contests are over,” says Dieter Jaeger of the Frankfurt-based Quickborner Team, the planning consultants for the building. Frank Duffy, a leading British architect with the firm DEGW, agrees: the pure North American skyscraper is under attack, he says, ironically just after it established itself at Canary Wharf. Before that development, he maintains, British architects simply failed to construct decent bank buildings. The difference in the quality of office accommodation between an American and a British bank “still has to be measured in decades”, he says. Pressure for a conceptual change comes from two sources, says Duffy: the growing realization among British architects that consumers of office space are becoming more demanding and the move toward a totally different approach in northern Europe. “It is open season on the philistinism of UK office developers,” he says in The Changing City, a book he wrote with Alex Henney. “The great need is for an alternative image of the office to that of a money-multiplying, inhuman, non-life-enhancing tower.” The best example of what they mean perhaps the only example is the ING headquarters in Amsterdam, a Hansel-and-Gretel-type village of 10 low towers whose walls slope in different directions (leading sound upwards to reduce noise nuisance) and creating a crazy quilt-like pattern along an S-shaped line. Duffy and Henney note that there are no parallel lines in the entire structure. The building is extremely user-friendly: no-one sits more than six metres from a window; windows can be opened; and restaurants, snack bars, post room, library, film theatre and conference rooms are all reached along an indoor walkway. Outside, employees can stroll through a splendid two-level Japanese-style garden. Whether such a setting is conducive to the creation of synthetic financial instruments remains to be seen, but since it (or rather its previous incarnation NMB-Postbank) moved into the building, ING has by no means been in a backwater of international banking. Duffy says that, architecturally, the building is at the forefront of innovative design. But in general, banks, unlike many electronics and telecoms companies, haven’t yet woken up to the “second wave” of thinking. The skyscraper encapsulated the Anglo-American principle of leveraging space: increasing value by multiplying square footage in the air. Now, he says, bank managements should be thinking more imaginatively about space and time. This might involve devising multiple uses for offices that are currently under-utilized, and spreading different functions geographically, at the same time creating office environments that are employee-friendly. The space occupied by corporate financiers, for example, who spend most of their time out of the office, could be shared or used differently. Dealmakers often work on airplanes, in other people’s offices, and in their own corporate conference rooms. All that time their own offices are empty. Duffy sees the need for an attitude change: “You don’t have to get everyone in the same place. You can drive buildings to produce more work. The relationship of people and space is fundamentally going to change.” It may be difficult to picture someone like a senior partner in corporate finance at Goldman Sachs in London, friendly as he may be with subordinates, sharing office space at Peterborough Court even if he is hardly ever there. On the other hand, for a deal-maker the idea of leveraging time and space while they are under-utilized must have some appeal. |
