ABSTRACT
Bank (which some critics with more erudition than common sense argue it to be a roguish quotation of a celebratory Roman rostral column!) is a satisfyingly strong piece of architectural gamesmanship formally reminiscent of what was there before. But if we can never remember what was there before, the gesture loses its meaning. In any case, such theatricality is a reminder of how, in other hands, a marriage between the developer’s vanity and ‘80’s Post-Modernism could produce rather peculiar designs. The building also appears to lack those elements of surprise and invention that made Stirling’s earlier work so intriguing, as well as the deftness and humour one associates with this distinctly idiosyncratic architect – that witty irreverence lifting his work above the mainstream. Bemusement at the design’s outmoded idiosyncracity had the media reporting that the building was designed in a spirit of derivative homage by a Stirling associate rather than the man himself. (But what is unusual in that? It was, in any case, posthumously completed by Michael Wilford & Associates, now also a closed practice. Such is the secret history of buildings, a clouded oral narrative which buildings themselves do little to elucidate.
