Split-Personality Bank

Brooklyn, New York
Columbia GSAPP
25,000 SF
2013

Given the systemic investment bank failures of 2008 and the increasing obsolescence of the bank as a physical space of retail transaction in the digital age, the building expresses an uneasy theoretical and morphological interplay between parallel narratives of ruin and invincibility, while simultaneously acknowledging the banal status-quo functionality of ATMs, teller counters, and loan offices.

Sitting in the shadow of the Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn (the ultimate amalgam of techno-futurist parametric architecture and casino capitalism), the bank takes cues from the invincible ruins of basketball arenas, an urban typology known for its largeness and extremely short life span.

The form and facade is derived from labyrinths, detritus accumulations, and dazzle camouflage patterns. The circulation wraps around a central atrium, with each successive floor revealing greater openness.

The representational style of the drawings attempts to reconcile the eternal and the ephemeral, suggesting time-based transformations that are both rational and chaotic, using Joseph Gandy’s 1830 drawing of John Soane’s Bank of England in ruins as a theoretical starting point.