Our great banking halls have become as endangered as our great banks. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Manufacturers Bank (now known as Manufacturers Hanover Trust), a citation winner in the first P/A design awards program in 1954, has miraculously survived on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. Designed by Gordon Bunshaft, it is a five-story, 94,000-square-foot, glass-walled Miesian box dwarfed by the towers around it. The original design reflected the relative openness and leisurely pace of post-World War II banking, with its Henry Dreyfuss-designed vault door visible from the street and its Harry Bertoia-designed mixed-metal screen presiding over an expansive and sparsely furnished mezzanine banking hall.
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