Bank Modernization

The first collision between the banking industry and architectural modernism is usually attributed to SOM and the Manufacturer's Hanover Branch Bank in Manhattan in 1954, but was actually led by Wenceslas Sarmiento on the west coast, who had studied under Oscar Niemeyer, who built the 1953 mid-Century landmark Glendale Federal Savings Building and a whole lot of forward-looking branch banks in Los Angeles, who then moved to St. Louis and operated nationally, who in Phoenix is responsible for the Financial Center at 3443 N. Central Avenue, and who is still, thankfully, with us.

It was a social revolution too. Back in the 1950s the banking industry occupied a more prominent place in the community and in the popular imagination, and before ATMs it was still necessary to go to the bank. Even as banks established networks of suburban branches, those mental / architectural images of conservatism, solidity, stability, and vaultishness were still important. There were important social expectations to be met. The Manufacturer's Hanover Branch became famous for flaunting its huge vault close the sidewalk, behind a single pane of glass, but it was still a sober and orderly building.

That changed in the 1960s. Suburban banks got weird. Attribute it to the new ability to compute hyperbolic paraboloids and build them in concrete, attribute it to the Space Race and the New Frontier, blame it on Buckminster Fuller, or fluoridated water or whatever you like, but Phoenix was hardly the only American city blessed with strange banks advancing quickly past Modernism into Extraterrestrial Extremism. According to a friend of mine of some years, a longtime Phoenix native and former classmate of Mrs. Walter Bimson, there was a good deal of negative reaction to this sort of thing in Phoenix -- undignified for banks to enter into a vulgar form of showbiz, to compete on the roadside.

Now the banking business has changed and this building genre has outlived its usefulness. Of course you don't go to the bank anymore. Like the elaborate movie palaces of the 1920s they're socially unnecessary and their heyday was brief. Money doesn't have time for this anymore.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Angle

Walter Bimson was a friend and supporter and near-client to Frank Lloyd Wright - nothing ever built, unfortunately. He hung out on those low-slung chairs at Taliesin. Some sources say Bimson was a patron of Wright's as early as 1942.

In practical terms Bimson had an important role in the realization of the Grady Gammage auditorium at ASU - specifically, he and a fellow Chicagoan named Lewis Ruskin guaranteed the payment of Frank Lloyd Wright's fee and continued to push the project after Wright's death.

In more speculative terms, FLW's office designed a number of projects for Bimson, including an unusual proposed Usonian house, in textile block, in Phoenix (1954-57), and two unbuilt VNB branches, one meant for the once-genteel Sunnyslope (1948), and another designated for Tucson (1947) that could have served as a prototype. This is according to the book "Treasures of Taliesin" assembled by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer out of the legendary and extensive Wright archives.

In the presentation drawing the proposed Tucson VNB branch is like a faceted jewel in its setting, seen from one side, with overhangs. It was going to be a sort of open-air affair, open to the sunlight, Phoencian style. This was immediately after the war, before modern architecture hit the banking industry on the east coast, and even before Wenceslas Sarmiento re-designed the suburban bank on the west coast.

At one point Wright wrote: "A bank should look like a strongbox, give a person a sense of security and protection for his money and valuables." The floorplan was a circle, with a hexagonal main floor with a mezzanine balcony and an open well looking into the basement, all lit from the overhead crystalline skylight. Downstairs were the vault, the safety deposit boxes and the bathrooms.

And around back, along the curved back wall, were 6 drive-up (not drive-through) windows.

This was the one design feature that Bimson and his board of directors absolutely rejected: a drive-up window. From Wright's perspective it fit right in with his vision of the American auto-centric 'Broadacre City', this low and loose urban form, a vision that would be proved correct. From VNB's perspective banking was a personal, social transaction and this wouldn't do. They wanted people to come inside the building.

So that's the story of how Bimson missed a chance to revolutionize banking. He and Wright still both came out okay. In 1948, First Interstate Bank introduced the first drive-through bank in the valley, at 15th Street and McDowell.