Buildings of the Banks (Imported from old blog)

I once learned in class that architecture much reflects in each era the fact of where money and wealth are from. It triggered me to go search some buildings/towers of the biggest financial institutions.

1. Federal Reserve

2. Bank of America (1 Bryant Park, New York)

The tower's architectural spire is 255.5 ft (77.9 m) tall and was placed on December 15, 2007. The building is 55 stories high and contains 2,100,000 square feet (195,096 m²) of office space, three escalators and a total of 52 elevators manufactured by Schindler Group – 50 to serve the offices and one leading to the transit mezzanine below ground.Several buildings were demolished to make way for the tower. Among them was the Hotel Diplomat, a 13-story structure which occupied the site at 108 West 43rd Street since 1911, and Henry Miller's Theatre, which was rebuilt and reopened under its previous location. The building's tenants include Bank of America as the anchor tenant, and the tower's platinum LEED rating and modern column-free office space has helped to entice tenants from all over the city. The Bank of America Tower is considered a worldwide model for green architecture in skyscrapers.

3. HSBC (Hongkong)

4. HSBC (Shanghai)

The HSBC Building has been called "the most luxurious building from the Suez Canal to the Bering Strait".^[1] The building has a floor area of 23,415 m², and was, at the time, the largest bank building in the Far East, and second largest in the world, after the Bank of Scotland building in Edinburgh.

The building exterior adopted a strict neo-classicist design, with a tripartite vertical and horizontal division. In the centre is a dome, the base decorated with a triangular structure in imitation of Greek temples. Below that are sixIonic columns penetrating from the second to the fourth storey. The main structure is five storeys, the central section seven storeys, with one and a half storey for the basement. The main structure has a steel lattice with brick filling, and a granite exterior.

The interior was luxuriously decorated, using materials such as marble and monel. The whole building was fitted with heating and air-conditioning. The main trading hall has four columns hewn from whole blocks of marble, which was at the time unique in Asia.

5. Goldman Sachs (New York)

The Goldman Sachs Tower also known as 200 West Street, is the global headquarters of Goldman Sachs located in Lower Manhattan. The building is a 740-foot-tall (230 m), 43-story building that opened in October 2009 in the Battery Park City neighborhood of Manhattan. It is located on West Street, between Vesey and Murray Streets. It is adjacent to the World Financial Center and the Conrad Hotels, across the street from the Verizon Building, and diagonally opposite the World Trade Center site and One World Trade Center. The skyscraper was designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, and received a Leed Gold certification.