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 But the real point is that the banking hall itself is obsolete for banking purposes; the transactions it was created for no longer take place, and its symbolism—the protection of cash in a space possessing a gravitas that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 compar…