1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointed, February 5, 2010
This review is from: Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society 1694-1942 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in Britis) (Hardcover)
I was quite disappointed with the workmanship and quality of this book. Given its steep price, I expected a high-quality art book. What I received was a "printed in China with cheap materials" book whose pages are not even acid-free paper. How can the steep price be justified?
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
History Within a Bank's Architecture, April 17, 2006
This review is from: Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society 1694-1942 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in Britis) (Hardcover)
I will say right off that I am a Sir John Soane fan. When we lived in England, almost every one of our frequent visits to London would include a stop at Sir John's museum, his home which, as architect, he had designed, and which he had filled with architectural models, sarcophagi, Hogarth paintings, and more. So in reading _Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society, 1694 - 1942_ (Yale University Press) by Daniel M. Abramson, I was most interested in the changes and additions which Soane had brought to the many buildings and rooms of the large plot that the bank eventually came to own. I was also ready to be furious in contemplation that his work on the bank, his masterpiece, was destroyed for modernization in the 1920s. Abramson's large-format book, sumptuously produced with hundreds of reproductions of prints, plans, and photographs, is indeed about a great deal more. As the title of the book indicates, the long life of the bank means that Soane could not have been the only architect, but was only one of a series. He was architect from 1788 to 1833, a time of the bank's expansion and prosperity, and most of the pages of the book rightly deal with his contributions, but what he had to work with and what was done to his own work have their place in this penetrating and detailed book as preface and afterword.
The bank was founded in 1694 with the simple mission of financing the wars of William III. After renting premises, it got its own property in the heart of London and George Sampson became its first architect, building in the Palladian style. He was followed by Sir Robert Taylor who produced fine exterior design for the bank's wings, and top-lit domed halls that borrowed from classical rotundas. Sir John Soane became the bank's architect on the death of Taylor in 1788. Soane took from classical sources and balanced them with a fine touch of poetic picturesqueness. He produced wonderfully original interiors, so full of strength and light that the bank for the first time became a tourist spot. His exterior designs were all harmonious within the objective of keeping the bank secure, but his adornment of the bank's acute northwest corner ("The Tivoli Corner") was ambitious and handsome. After The First World War, it was time to bring the bank from the eighteenth into the twentieth century. The need for modernization was obvious, with plumbing, electricity, and telephones for which Soane could not have planned, and so perhaps the complete makeover of the bank by Sir Herbert Baker was inevitable. It must be said that Soane got from Baker what Taylor had gotten from Soane, a nearly total effacement of what had gone before, but still, the imposition of Baker's buildings upon the site was, in the words of one critic, "... in spite of the Second World War - the worst individual loss suffered by London architecture" in the first half of the twentieth century. For a Soane fan like me, the pictures of the demolition are devastating. Baker even removed decoration from the Tivoli Corner. He did arrange, however, for a statue of Soane to be put up, but as one critic remarked, "When one has destroyed a man's best work, I suppose it is the gentlemanly thing to do."
Ironically, the reaction to the loss of Soane's work and of other Georgian architecture fueled Britain's preservation movement, and now the bank is a listed building that cannot make any changes without governmental authorization. This is why Abramson's account ends at 1942; the bank has undergone all the changes that can, for now, be imagined. It has, however, made a nod to acknowledge its losses; the Bank Stock Office has been rebuilt just as Soane had designed it. Abramson's account is a superb synthesis of architecture and history. He reads and illustrates the bank's past and Britain's, in a book that is sure to be the ultimate reference about its particular subject, but is also an intelligent reflection on how historic and economic forces shape architecture in general.
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