I appreciate both Casey Mack and George Claflen’s careful reading of my piece on the JPMorgan Chase headquarters. I don’t like the notion of a grand old bank turning into a Duane Reade either, although I will concede that they make pretty good catering halls. But the real point is that the banking hall itself is obsolete for banking purposes; the transactions it was created for no longer take place, and its symbolism—the protection of cash in a space possessing a gravitas that appears to go back centuries—no longer matters. In seeing a connection between this symbolism and the JPMorgan tower I was not suggesting that there was anything “patrician” about the building—quite the contrary—but that it represented an attempt to restore some degree of gravitas to the contemporary notion of a bank.
Yes, it’s true that both my review and Mark Krotov’s were mixed, even if mine leaned more to the positive and his toward the negative. I agree that there are strengths to the Foster Comcast tower in Philadelphia, but it is programmatically so different that it is hard to compare them directly, except in terms of the aesthetics of the skyscraper. As to JPMorgan’s refusal to allow the building any public space, I share the writers’ dismay, which I hope came through in my review.