A few weeks ago, I was walking with my father near his small business in suburban southern Connecticut. I don’t get home much, so I was a little surprised to see the building next door all but emptied out. Having fortified myself to work for Dad on coffee and bagels and pizza and whatnot from these businesses throughout my formative years, it’s a little something like losing an old friend.

I can’t say how long the place has stood, but I’d wager it’s one of the longer-lived buildings on this middling-to-boho stretch of shopping road, not far from the line between one of the nations’ most affluent communities and one of its most troubled cities. And in my time (the past 15 years) there’s been practically no business turnover in this particular strip; a small farm stand (run by the landlord), a pizza joint, a newsstand, and a local donut shop (which survived rather well all along, despite the Dunkin’ Donuts sitting right beside it.)

The landlord’s death, along with the steady demand for commercial real estate here led inevitably to this liquidation. Nothing out of the ordinary thus far – the circle of life and all that - so let’s leave it aside for just a second. Turn around and look a hundred yards up from this doomed old plaza, where new business is sprouting up fast and furious. Bank business.

Passing this new Commerce Bank branch, what struck me most immediately was how un-banklike it looks – at least in traditional terms. Vast expanses of plate-glass scream not “I’m impenetrable,” but “gaze inside me, look at the customers, at the airy, attractively-lit space, at the localized-for-the-area mural inside (perhaps evoking old WPA post office murals; you can view a small gallery of Commerce Bank murals here)

The implacable arches-and-columns stolidity of the banks of yore might have been all so much pretense and “salesmanship”, as Blair Kamin put it in this illuminating 2005 article on the changing face of bank architecture. Yet as new branches roll over the land, defying the logic that brick-and-mortar banks should wither away as people move towards online banking, I think there’s something notable (if not bland and cookie-cutter, at the same time) about this new style of bank design, both inside and out.

First off, it’s interesting that Kamin writes “banks want to look like Starbucks,” because that’s the first comparison that came to mind. There’s a similar aesthetic, if not an aping of style, at play here in the use of space, light, building and decorative materials. You could envision this structure becoming a Starbucks or Gap in as much time as it took to roll coffee machines or clothesracks in, were the bank to fail – and that is increasingly intentional, as Kamin notes.

But in the here and now, is there an implicit cultural-technological-economic statement being made with a slightly diaphanous bank building like this, something like “not much actual physical money is kept here”? Perhaps that’s reading a bit much into it, even if there’s more than a grain of truth to it in an age of digitized currency.

We look in from the street; whereas old banks ostentiously displayed their outer facades, the exhibitionism of these new banks appears to involve a laying open of the inside, a show of people and “services” that go far beyond the deposit, withdrawal and storage of cash. Yet if you suspect it’s all extremely standardized, that’s because it is. The new generation of banks is heavy on customer-first concepts, concretized in a physical template; Commerce is “America’s most convenient bank,” open seven days a week. Kamin’s article mentions Washington Mutual’s Occasio concept (whose FAQ makes for some telling reading; “Combining the research with cues taken from top-notch retailers, Washington Mutual set out to design its retail banking stores accordingly.”) You could go a few towns over and see other Commerce branches which are identical but for the mural inside. Or you could just go to the Commerce Bank website itself – there it is, the model, the template bank.

The particular aesthetic/architectural analysis is only one aspect of this, of course; another is the macro trend of branch bank expansion and its economic and social effects upon towns and regions; from the financial muscle banks can (and must) muster to expand in line with their rivals, to the eventual glut of bank buildings potentially diluting the character and sales tax revenues of a retail area. What response, if any, could or should there be from other actors, private and political?

Right next door to this Commerce branch, on the site of an old KFC, another, as yet unidentified bank is under construction. This part of the world, I should mention, is not short of banks to begin with.

Still, you wonder, what’s planned for the site of that old farm stand strip just a block down the road?

Need you ask? I did. “Another bank,” my father responded, somewhat wearily.

Labels: changes, home, suburbs