Such Nice Places to Keep Money

Churches, with their steeples, and banks, with their classic columns, used to be the most traditional stereotypes of public buildings. But these two conservative institutions have proved in recent times the most daringly experimental when it comes to architecture --partly because they are built not for efficiency but for the glory of, respectively, God and Mammon, and are not forced into egg-cratery by the economic demands of multitudinous offices in little space. Modern churches now come in all shapes, from fishes to flying saucers. But recently, new banks have begun to rival new churches in variety, elegance, and novelty.

> The Security First National Bank branch in Los Angeles' International Airport Center looks as gay as a country club. The round pavilion with glass walls and a cookie-cutter roof juts out from a circular pedestal, and might be overlooking the swimming pool and the 18th hole instead of the corner of Century Boulevard and Vicksburg Avenue. But by some medieval quirk, Welton Becket & Associates has designed the entrances as bridges over a moat.

> In Mount Clemens, Mich., a former spa still reminded of its past by the faint odor of sulphur water, civic morale has been bolstered by the erection of the $350,000 headquarters of the Mount Clemens Federal Savings & Loan Association. Architects Meathe, Kessler & Associates of Grosse Pointe, designed a graceful concrete hat with upturned brim, decorated it with plastic skylights, and surrounded it with fountains and gardens.

> The Great Western Savings & Loan Association's new branch building in Gardena, Calif., is thunderously massive without being forbidding. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it is all roof and piers. A great flat slab 112 ft. square floats 20 ft. above the glassed-in banking space; supporting it are eight gigantic piers, like upended paving blocks.

> On Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, the Perpetual Savings Bank has perpetuated itself in a delicate honeycomb by Edward D. Stone. Tier upon tier of arches suggests a squared-off Tower of Pisa; behind the concrete colonnades is an all-glass building. At each floor level, a continuous flower bed with piped-in water provides hanging gardens to heighten the parallel between Beverly Hills and Babylon.

> Most unorthodox of all is the National Shawmut Bank's little branch in Boston's Bowdoin Square Government Center. Architects Imre and Anthony Halasz were asked to design a temporary structure that could be torn down when the Government Center was completed. This might take a decade, reasoned the Halasz brothers, and all that time something ugly and un inspired would be sitting there. So they drew up plans for something attractive and imaginative: a red brick snailshell. Customers enter where a snail would, find tellers ranged behind a curved counter inside the shell. Daylight comes through a plastic dome in the roof. The little building has caused much comment ("Entering it along that sloping pathway," says a woman depositor, "is like being sucked into a hair drier"), and many Bostonians will be sorry to see it torn down.

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