Chrámy peněz
Postmoderní architektura českých bankovních domů a spořitelen v devadesátých letech 20. století
Иллюстрации и карты
illustrations
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In almost every Czech town, the buildings of banking houses and savings banks represent an architectural layer that nowadays represents the chaotic and bittersweet period of the transformation of society after the fall of the totalitarian regime and the building of a new democratic state directed by Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Klaus. The largest of them, which were created by the collapse of the State Bank of Czechoslovakia, remained strategically owned by the state with their majority shares, played a key role in the privatization process and thus became symbolic monuments of the stage later referred to as banking socialism. The book presents the stories of 23 selected banking houses, reflecting the specific regional colour and personal approach of their architects. It reveals what meanings shape their fragile postmodern identity, which was generally associated with the promise of a new lifestyle characteristic of Western society taking shape from the late 1970s onwards. The individual essays on the bank houses were mostly based on personal interviews with architects and are accompanied by rich architectural documentation, especially a large number of contemporary photographs, illustrating the original representative form of these buildings, which is now mostly irretrievably lost under the layers of reconstruction.
The contemporary context of the book is complemented by artistically conceived visual collages. These are compiled from foreign catalogues presenting office interior products as well as from advertisements that appeared in Western architectural magazines at the time and thus had a considerable influence on shaping local architects' ideas about the form of the corporate image. The book thus sets up some parallels between the construction of the representative identity of large semi-state banking institutions and the identity of the new democratic state, and in general reconstructs the scenography of the socio-political transformation, its ideals and its myths.
