The Provident Life & amp; Trust Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a Victorian-era building destroyed by architect Frank Furness, is considered one of his greatest works. A bank and insurance company founded in 1865 by members of the Society of Friends (Quaker), the L Provident-shaped building has an entrance at 407-09 Chestnut Street (bank) and 42 South 4th Street (insurance company). Both wings were eventually consolidated into the office building (also by Furness) in the northwest corner of 4 & amp; Chestnut Road.
Video Provident Life & Trust Company
Creation
In his Brazilian Pavilion at Centennial Exposition 1876, and Centennial National Bank (1876) at St. 32 & amp; Lancaster Ave., Furness experimented with architectural features that would be part of his distinctive design vocabulary: an unusual stone extermination; reveal (and even highlight) the structure; compression, columns like pistons; polychromy, all in the Moorish-influenced Modern Gothic style. The Provident Life & amp; The Trust Company is a major breakthrough for Furness, and remains vibrant even after its subsequent addition, interior, and exterior, completely destroys its power.
The bank at 407-09 Chestnut Street is to be part of Philadelphia's "Banker's Row", and the challenge is to distinguish it from established Italian buildings. Furness won a Provident commission in a national design competition in 1876, defeating his former partner, George Hewitt. The powerful modern Gothic facade demands attention, the bay and the tower projecting it in a compressed column, supported by corbels protruding from the building. The whole is a study of stress and compressed energy, heavy, but not towering.
The interior is a large room, a 4-storey wall and a floor covered with multi-colored Minton tiles, a curved iron truss in the middle of the building adorned with inspired pieces of machine, and skylights supported by the same piece of iron rolls. The front half is lit by large Gothic windows from the ceiling projecting large facades and skylights; the back, by the skylight window and the other clerestory facing north. The rear windows of the insurance company on 4th Street opened into a bright and light banking room. The effect is more like a church than a secular one - a shrine to commerce - with the severity and logic that initiated the Chicago School in the early twentieth century of modernism.
Maps Provident Life & Trust Company
Expansion
Almost immediately, Furness's original vision has been compromised as the company evolves. Within a few years, a curved low balcony was added at the rear, and the other at the front under a large Gothic window, accessed by a spiral staircase to the banking floor and then from the building to the east. The bank expanded northward onto Ranstead Street, clerestory windows were blocked, and a second balcony was added at the rear. In 1888, the Provident purchased all adjacent properties to the east, and rented Furness, Evans & amp; Company to build a 10-storey office building.
Furness's Provident Building (1888-90) is a disappointment, a bustling Bavarian fantasy attached to the model of creative rationalism. In his lesser stories, he replicates polychromatic materials from the bank and echoes the Gothic arch, but most of the office buildings are calculating and stately. Its steep, 3-story roof is red, juxtaposed with a new pyramid roof for the bank tower - a duncecap on what has become the smartest student. The demolition of the 1945 office building (and the removal of duncecap) allowed the architect to see the new original bank.
Demolition
Across Chestnut Street from the Furness bank is the Second Bank of the United States (1819-24), a white Greek Revival temple, by William Strickland. Planning for what is now Independence National Historical Park (INHP) began in the late 1940s, and the Strickland bank was to become a portrait of the housing art museum of the Founding Fathers. In the opposite bank block of Furness, every building except the Second Bank was destroyed for the national park, and the re-creation of the William Library Library of Philadelphia (1790) was established. Banker's Row's equitable Italianate buildings are considered harmonious with the Second Bank and the re-created Library Hall; Provident is considered jarring.
During the 1950s, architectural historians worked to rescue the Furness bank, writing articles for major publications, photographing and documenting them. Charles E. Peterson, National Park Service architect assigned to INHP, edited the column in the Society of Architectural Historians and used it to call attention to the Provident. In the end, however, the Colonial Revivalist remained free, and the Furness bank was destroyed beginning in 1959. Minton's tiled samples and other architectural elements were preserved in a collection of architectural studies at INHP.
The point is, impertinent, Look-At-Me! -the quality that has won the Furness the Provident Commission is the main reason for the demolition of the building. The architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock praised him in 1963:
"Still more original and impressive are the banks, although they lay quite out of the main line of commercial architecture development in this period.The most remarkable of these, and the work of Furness, is the Provider Institute at Walnut. sic Chestnut Street, was built until the end of 1879. It was unfortunately destroyed in the urban renewal campaign of Philadelphia a few years ago, but the gigantic and strong scale of granite membership alone should justify its respectable preservation.The interior, entirely lined with patterned tiles, is a character somewhat older than facade and finally many who are full of later distractions, but that also does nothing in its own way. "
Note
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments