Are banks the devil or are they places for good people making a quick dollar? Beginning with the simple table from which they take their name, banks developed into one of the most splendid building types as they sought to reassure depositors. Today they are on the verge of disappearing altogether. As a credit union, the project is about the collective ownership of an institutional building and acts as an architecture of exchange that questions the role of finance and institutional architecture in relation to the city. The nature of the relationship between bank typology and its urban context is an exchange that informs the credit union architecture. This occurs through a series of transactional negotiations that play out across site. These exchanges are lenses for: responding to paradigm shifts, engaging the public through transparency, the legacy of bank typologies, and the role of institutional architecture in the city. The project is an alternative to corporate banks and reintroduces institutional architecture that funds the city for legacy while celebrating the act of the individual engaging with it. Moreover, the project is a demonstration of institutional architecture as a tool for defining urban spatial economies in response to paradigms and the relationship between finance and city, emphasising institutional expression through the architecture. Funding the city is not just a monetary figure but also how the built fabric provides spaces that are responsive to societal needs. Institutions have moved from funding cities for legacy to short term gains. In response, the project questions how an institute’s legacy outlives its occupants, and that legacy is not about the longevity of a single building but more about what that building provides for its existing and future occupancy.
The project as a credit union acts as an alternative to corporate banks and a means of reintroducing the process of institutions funding cities for legacy. The Credit union serves as a vessel to explore the relationship between paradigm, institute and the city while emphasising institutional expression through the architecture. In the project, the nature of the relationship between bank typology and its context is an exchange that informs the credit union architecture. In addition, these exchanges are lenses for: the paradigm responses; engaging the public through transparency; the legacy of bank typologies and the role of institutional architecture in the city. The credit union is situated in the Treasury precinct, infiltrating the existing spaces while adding to the site as a conglomerate. As the treasury has a close regulatory relationship with the finance industry, it provides an ideal canvas for a bank that engages the city. The site represents the rich layering of the urban with buildings being erected as symbols of key economic periods in the state’s history. The precinct has an interesting overlay of public and private, specifically in the Treasury under-crofts. These became important in determining how the credit union negotiates the site while providing spaces that address what is revealed and what is concealed. Having a bank within the treasury precinct represents the relationship between financing and city governance. Who really holds power and what are the implications?
PLAN
1:2000
The exchanges and negotiations within banks and their operational structures are translated into exchanges and transactions in the project through the design strategies. These exchanges are defined by 3 categories: the negotiation with the precinct, the transaction between adjacent building components and the interaction with the customer. The section summarizes how these exchanges are deposited on site and sit within the credit union edifice.
Exchange of building and site: The exchange between building and site talks to the symbiotic relationship with the treasury as shown through the connections to the existing. Here, the structural systems containing the credit components sits along the treasury building façade allowing connectivity between the buildings. It is scavenging the ruins of the modernist treasury and contrasts with the less symmetric façade of the credit union. This connection speaks both to the contrast of buildings that reflect their time and finance with city governance.
Exchange Components The next exchange is between the architectural components. The credit union occupies pieces of banking’s past, sitting on the foundations, reusing its façade in new ways. Here, the project explores how the components are layered within the existing. They are not homogenous but rather considered and each component sits within adjacencies, borrowing parts to compose the whole. This draws on how the built environment is an extension of our condition which is informed by our decisions and actions. It also draws on the operational exchanges that happen within an institute and how the building can be responsive to paradigm shifts. Here, the core structures house the various spaces and components that are adaptable to its use. The outcome is a continuous layering are parts that are deposited and withdrawn from the building. Its speaks to value of adaptability and that the credit union is not static but continuously evolving.
McArthur St. assembly
Exchange of occupancy: Within any institution, there is a mutually beneficial relationship with the client. This plays out through the interaction. It is a ritual behaviour used to achieve the desired outcome. This transactional performance translates to the exchange of occupancy within the project. The adjacencies from the components reveal moments of intersections that allow for occupiable space. These spaces are reflective of the collective ownership of the building intended for its members.
The Atrium acts like the palazzi in early banking, providing a spatial generosity for its use. Columns that divide up the atrium are the only permanent structure. Tellers and bio- scanning kiosks sit between these while cardboard-thin Dividers are suspended above the branches.
As a credit union is for its members, the building should be for them too. The board hall is the main meeting room sitting above the atrium. It moves away from the formalities of a traditional board room but instead the circular formation is one of gathering, allowing for an increased exchange with its people.
The interaction of spaces is determined by the way they are accessed. The credit union is composed of various thoroughfares and access-ways. This thoroughfare connects the building proper and the treasury place portion while doubling as a meeting space. Its axillary role is permanent, and the occupation is temporal, emphasizing the adaptability of the project.
This journey exaggerates the floor layouts of banks designed around the procession from entry to teller. The access here is an infiltration of the treasury undercrofts and talks about the domestication of the corporate through the blurred public/private boundaries. .
Treasury Place entry assembly
The multiple modes of access to the building further speaks to the series of exchanges that encourage it’s members engagement. The Treasury Place entry locates itself on the existing treasury place elevation.
The entrance here is a detached façade and the series of spaces that follow unfold slowly as a landscape of structures that interweave internal and external.
Through this journey, the building proper silhouettes itself between the old and new treasury buildings. However, its access is not immediate instead it meanders through the interconnecting spaces.
The Mcarthur street entrances to the north are more immediate and systematic. This is due to it being the business end of the building proper. The Entries here sit within a narrow wedge adjacent to the site boundary and themselves are narrow.
These entrances also act as a connection to the deck below. Here you can see into the atrium as the path veers to the undercrofts. The choose your own adventure entries talks to the ideas of institutional transparency, what is being concealed and revealed.
Bank operational system are selectively displayed or hidden to the public. In the project this becomes a performative architecture that balances transparency and concealment that furthers its versatility. The key operational aspects like the board hall and datacentre are on display to the street front where, public occupancy occurs within the more private undercroft.
Like the various entrance types, the interior journey is achieved through different circulation systems. The series of ramps, stairs, walkways, and ladders act as an armature for the internal negotiations.
The exchanges also exist within the buildings systems. A defining feature of banks are their logos used as a means of identifying individual business. Prior to the mid20th century, ornamentation and motifs were a bank’s logo. The project engages symbology of past banks and reintroduces ornamentation and motifs to generate form and pattern across different scales. This led to a design strategy that incorporated ornamentation into the structural system and motifs as material treatments that are repeated in the shape of rooms and connections.
The motifs also serve as a connection to the bank architectural history. For example, the ornate columns of the ANZ gothic bank on Collins Street have been reappropriated into the credit union’s columns. This exchange of place considers the forgotten parts of the built environment. It shows that responding to context is not just looking at the future but negotiating the historical condition in relation to institutional buildings.
west elevation
north elevation
Funding the city is not just a monetary figure but also how the built fabric provides spaces that are responsive to societal needs. The project explores the relationship between finance of architecture and the city, ultimately celebrating this relationship through the credit union and the individuals engaging with it. Institutions have moved from funding cities for legacy to short term gains. In response, the project questions how an institute’s legacy outlives its occupants, and that Legacy is not about the longevity of a single building but more about what that building provides for its existing and future occupancy.
CATHEDRALS banking past
Architecture movements arise as a reaction to the zeitgeist of evolving societies. A zeitgeist has mass influence on society’s progress, and is a synthesis of philosophy, art, history, science and architecture. As such buildings are a product of their age. We are currently in another global shift with: human-driven climate change, Globalisation, shifts in economic powers, a digital revolution, much-needed social justice and a global pandemic. These paradigm shifts become imbedded within the built fabric and today are driven by investors and developers. With banking’s role in economics, the finance industry has become the dominating power that drives society.
PARADIGM
Currently Melbourne is in a property boom which promises an economic flourish. These trends usually come with deregulation and are closely followed by some form of economic crisis. This provides an opportunity for meaningful response in the form of a more robust regulatory system. A bank should set the standards for banking and through the project exploration, I will investigate how a bank architecture responds to Melbourne’s population, economic and urban growth.
TYPOLOGY
As a building typology, banks represent the propagation of architecture movements, adopting techniques of mass advertising to promote their vision. The banking structure is driven by internal operational systems that are reflected in the architecture. Architecture provides a tool for which banks symbolise their security and prosperity and in turn the banks finance architecture. The intention here is to understand these systems to reconfigure them in a new typology.
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palazzi bank
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ORIGINS
Through their many iterations, banks have shifted from being centralised to dispersed; from austere vaults to transparent boxes exposing their contents; from security of physical currency to security of digital privacy; a shift from funding the arts to funding coal mines. Following renaissance banks, John Soane’s vision for the Bank of England sought to create reassurance on a foundation of gold, and the vault-like layout became a standard of banks. These fortresses symbolised economic power and banks became key institutes that defined towns and cities, inspiring public confidence through strength and stability.
Bank of England
Louis Sullivan Bank
Bank Vault
SHIFT
However, banking has a problematic past. The early success of the industry is closely linked to colonisation and was built on the slave trade. This saw the first shift in social responsibility of banks. In addition, the financial industry is responsible for the great depression, the recession in the 1980s and the global financial crises 20 years later. Architecture as a tool of representation becomes complicit in this history.
COMPLICITY
CONCEALMENT
With each crisis came public distrust and banks had to redefine public perception. With modernity came broad societal and technological changes. Banking was rebranded as customer-service centric with a focus on public-mindedness. Technology was highlighted in bank design, becoming more transparent and luminous, haling a new era of customer confidence.
TRANSPARENCY
REDEFINING PERCEPTION
Banking function, funding and structure exist within operational systems present in the buildings. These relationships reveal the carefully calculated methods by which things are concealed and revealed. This becomes a performative architecture that balances transparency and concealment that respond to the discourse and can be used a method for designing my bank.
Banking System
SYSTEM
The ATM represents technology’s importance in banking. As the ATM became more prominent, bank designs once again changed. The ATM vestibule shifted the floor plan from an interior experience to facadism. This also meant suburban and country branches became uneconomic. This led to the great-sell off and erasure of increasingly obsolete branch buildings
ATM
Todays technological paradigm requires a mediation between the digital and spatial. Contemporary banks typically consist of data centres, call centres and smart branches. However, the move away from customer facing is removing the interaction between financer and client. This questions the need for transparency or what is revealed to the public.
N
TA A D
Lloyd’s Building
CE
E
TR
CALL CENTRE
HSBC - Hong Kong
MICRO MICRO-BRANCH
MICRO-BRANCH
TECHNO-PARADIGM
POSTBANK
RECONFIGURABLE
The treasury precinct will be the site for the project. As the treasury has a close regulatory relationship with the finance industry, it provides an ideal canvas for a credit union.
SITE
The site represents the rich layering of the city with buildings being erected as symbols of key economic periods in the state’s history. The treasury building has had 3 iterations with a current 4th in development.
TREASURY 3
TREASURY 1
TREASURY 2
SITE
Having a bank on this site represents the relationship between financing and a city governance. Who really holds power and what are the implications? Through the site, the project is a critique of financier’s role in a city’s development and architecture as a reflection on the current climate.
SITE
A NEW RENAISSANCE?
Early financiers bank-rolled the renaissance through their repentance. Are todays less guilt-ridden bankers willing to do the same and finance a new renaissance?.
exchange
Negotiation - Exchange of context/site The negotiation is a response to the current paradigm shift. To make an architecture adaptable to things such a climate change, social justice, globalisation and the digital revolution, it needs to be considered within the design. This exchange considers the credit union is an ethical Trojan horse wearing the parts of institutional buildings, the sheep’s clothing haphazardly stretched together. It begins to reveal the condition within, where the corporate facade bulges as the internal takes hold.
“look over there!” - Exchange of observer/occupant Bank buildings house their operational system that are selectively displayed or hidden to the public. This becomes a performative and reconfigurable architecture that balances transparency and concealment, adapting to its physical and social context. It represents how banks carefully curate a public image. Modules of credit union are taken from storage in the former old treasury and placed within the system as needed. To ensure transparency, an observers stand is setup across the road to view the performance.
Staging – Exchange of architecture components The exchange here is a staging of architectural components. The skin is a thin cardboard on a scaffold and moving behind the set reveals the fakeness. Its not unlike building refurbishments where a secondary skin of scaffold abstracts what is beneath. It is a facade veiling the true intention.
The forgotten - Exchange of place Responding to context is not just looking at the future but negotiating the historical condition and urban order. The exchange of place considers the forgotten parts of the built environment and society that are usually erased or covered. In part it is reconciliation and how these can be integrated within the project.
Conversation – Exchange of service Within any institution, there is a mutually beneficial relationship with the client. This plays out through the interaction. It is a ritual behaviour, an almost automated seduction to achieve the desired outcome. The exchange is approached in two ways: pleasantries and confrontation. On one end is the pleasant building, using politeness to achieve its intent, on the other is the confrontational building, aggressive in its approach and probably wanting to speak to the manager.