It deserves a shorter beautiful name, for one thing. Its awkward name makes it anonymous. It's inviting and informal as hell, but it's a dull bank. It's an ephemeral membrane, but firmly defends its southwest corner in midtown Manhattan, 510 Fifth Avenue at 43rd. It's dated and timeless and strict and playful all at once. It seems essentially clean and bright although your eyes are drawn and caught, early on, in the third or fourth beat of your visual examination, to grids of ceiling panels that not only look unclean but forever uncleanable. It's visibly aging but strangely cutting-edge or, if you prefer, mid-Century retro-futuristic.

Like Grand Central Terminal it's remarkable for the empty space it contains, and if the eye lingers on those sickly luminous squares with their schmutzy dark spots, so what. The aluminum-and-glass frame makes itself invisible. Two voids, the one above it and the one within it, become important. But an impression of rightness and tightness and cleanness persists, along with a dawning sense that this must be a famous and treasured building, which it's not, not really. The best paradox of all is that this perpetual adolescent is such an old example of its kind.

It dates from 1954. It looks younger. It's usually credited to Gordon Bunshaft and Charles Evans Hughes III of Skidmore Owings and Merrill, an early triumph for SOM.

Set the wayback machine for 1950 and stroll around and go look at banks. All of them had to look impregnable, designed against marauding hoards. Thick walls and giant stone columns and iron doors and strong vaults went nicely with the cryptic quasi-Roman neoclassic aesthetics on the greenback dollar, and suggested the Roman strength of Washington DC, and those architectural notions about security and conservatism and safety and sheer weight were necessary so the customers wouldn't get nervous about the overall success of American capitalism. The security theatre of its day.

Most sources credit Bunshaft's design for the Manufacturer's Hanover Trust Branch Bank for bravely applying the clean, bright, open international style to banks for the very first time, and allowing all that stony weight of conventional wisdom to simply drop away. The culture wakes and realizes, banks don't have to be physically dense to be secure. Does this seem obvious in retrospect? Yeah. This, then, here on Fifth Avenue, would be the first modern bank in the US, unprecedented, unconventional, and gorgeously naked. The client, Harold Flanagan, told Gordon Bunshaft, "If this doesn't work, we'll both have to leave town."

Did it work? Yes. There were parties when it opened.

This is an appealing narrative, powered by the emotional subtext of cutting away and dropping off all that historical ballast towards what Bucky Fuller called ephemeralization, and that almost-physical sense of increased speed and agility and vitality and jet-set innovation might lead you to believe that mid-Century modernization was a kind of weight-loss program.

Yeah, it's an appealing narrative. You might have gotten some argument from Charles Hughes, who was on the SOM staff and, according to Bunshaft's own recollections, drew up the (say it with me all together now) Manufacturer's Hanover Trust Branch Bank himself over a weekend in a sort of informal competition conducted among three or four young designers. This was Skidmore's idea. You young guys, let's see what you can do on your own time. Skidmore rewarded Hughes by giving him a measly $50 and taking him off the project. You young guys, here's a quarter. Scram. So this wasn't Bunshaft's naked bank.

Realistically, though, Bunshaft or Hughes, doesn't matter. Remember these are Modernists we're talking about, with the (non-existant) Modernist concern about program and site. Somebody was bound to apply the glass wall to a bank sooner or later. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

And you might get some argument from a certain Wenceslaus Alfonso Sarmiento, who had been a draftsman under Oscar Niemeyer in the late 40's and was up to the same shocking cultural shift out on the west coast. Sarmiento made a decades-long career from this same banking revolution, mainly in the American suburbs, erasing one architectural trope (the solid little windowless neoclassical bank) and replacing it with another (the transparent matrix of visible transactions), and altering social expectations about the visibility of one's money. It's a matter of trust. His five-story international-style Pioneer Savings Bank Building on Wilshire dates from 1953, predating this one by a year. If you've seen a tall 60's-style bank from the highway that looks a little too proud of itself, it was likely positioned against a stuffy downtown banking tomb that is no longer there, and likely designed by Mr. Sarmiento. So the Hanover bank probably wasn't the first naked bank.