Maureen Connor
This is a collaborative project for Greg Sholette’s Imaginary Archive Collaboratorium. It begins with the discovery of a book, The Making of a Modern Bank, a self- promotional hardback, published in 1923 by the Continental and Commercial National Bank of Chicago. Although the illustrations, fonts and layout as well as the language of the book have a distinctly Edwardian, ‘Boston Brahmin’ style long absent from contemporary book design, the reassuringly upper class quality of the text and images is used to this day in advertising for banks and finance companies. And there are other parallels to current and recent financial ‘representation’ and events. Despite it’s apparent fiscal strength and expertise Continental and Commercial National Bank announced in this publication, they had to be rescued just a few years later, in 1932, by a $50 million loan from Reconstruction Finance Corp. (a federal agency) and became Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Co.
For my contribution to ‘Imaginary Archive’ I’m picturing what might have happened if this “bail out” had not occurred. Instead, what if the bank’s enormous building, which takes up an entire city block in downtown Chicago’s financial district, was given over to housing the indigent, specifically to the organization Hull House, begun by Jane Addams as a Settlement House in 1889? Although, by the 1920s, Hull House had itself expanded to include most of another city block, one on Chicago’s south side, they could shelter only a small fraction of those left homeless by the Great Depression. What if the $50 million loan to Continental and Commercial National Bank had instead been granted to Hull House to shelter these “forgotten” men and women, as they were called at the time?
“Bank Book”, describes the possible outcome of such government largesse. Using the form of a pop-up book to ‘document’ the transformation of the bank into a communal homestead for Chicago residents down on their luck, each turn of the page represents a different stage in the conversion of the Continental and Commercial National Bank building from business to domestic space. The primary models for these transformations are the floor plans, spacial proportions and cooperative arrangements developed by ‘material feminists’, who are described by Dolores Hayden in her 1981 book, The Grand Domestic Revolution, as “women who identified the economic exploitation of women’s domestic labor by men as the most basic cause of women’s inequality.” Starting in the 1870s, a time when larger U.S. cities began to build multiple dwellings, material feminists proposed ideas such as communal cooking and childcare, as a way to turn isolated domestic work into social labor while still preserving private living quarters for individual families.
In many ways the Beaux Arts style of the Continental and Commercial bank, designed by Daniel Burnham, (who also designed the Flatiron building in New York City) lends itself to such alterations. The large open areas in the center of each floor illuminated by a huge skylight contrast with the smaller offices and teller windows located around the building’s edges—a layout that can be adapted to the particular combination of public and private that represented the core of the material feminists’ approach to space. Meanwhile the building’s classical details such as columns, balustrades, pediments, cartouches and other aspects of its original grandeur remain, serving as reminders of an abolished social hierarchy.
-Maureen Connor
