Gerle János: Palaces of Money - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)

The way money is made-on the facade of the issuing bank. Relief by Károly Senyei

..fulfilling the most fundamental requirement of architecture, namely the obligation for a building to proclaim its function even on the outside. The Financial Institutions Centre does not suggest that it is a public building and that it is a fortress of money. Instead, it might be mistaken for a tobacco factory or a huge state penitentiary, or, at best, a dreary block of flats, (from Béla Kender’s article in Művészet.)

The passage quoted above suggests that for the public the representation of money had been permanently associated with historical forms. What therefore remains to be answered is the question whether or not bank buildings erected in our times, the ones referred to in the introduction, represent a new form of self- expression.

The beginning of the feverish campaign of erecting new banks in recent years marked the end of a nearly seventy-five year hiatus in the history of domestic bank building. For the sake of precision, one has to point out that there certainly were both large and small headquarters and branch offices built for the banking system monopolized by the state. However, these constructions were all created in the spirit of a supposedly functional approach, which was but a thin disguise for a total lack of any aesthetic standards. (The only means of representation was the information conveyed on the signboard on the wall.) The appearance that there was a

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