ABSTRACT
I once gave a talk to the marketing department at a large Northeastern United States university during which I presented my work on architectural metaphors of the World Wide Web, using the banking industry as an illustrative example. I began to sketch some basic concepts of architectural expression, only to be interrupted with impatient questions. “Are you talking about buildings?” I was asked, to which I replied, well yes, but also what buildings mean. “But don’t most people use ATM machines for their banking now?” Once again, I replied in the affirmative, but that the form of banks has been, and I believe still is, an important strategic tool for communicating certain values about financial institutions. “Do people really know about the way bank buildings look?” – another scholar interrupted me, as I was trying to establish my research assumptions. I realized then that I was going to have difficulty making my point: that architecture provides a visual language that has served commerce well, and that this language retains its communicative aspect even within the virtual, electronic world of the Internet. Thus, to study this language’s roots is useful to understand how architecture – as a cultural reference system – provides a symbolic method of representing human, commercial, and spiritual values.
