The building was originally designed as a bank.  The Brenton Banks were a family owned chain of successful financial institutions known for embracing the formalism and narrative of modern architecture. The Brenton, as the building is now aptly named, is not simply modern.  It is New Formalism, a style which emerged in the 1960s as a rejection to the rigid form of Modernism.  The style represents one of many 20th century efforts to wed the building forms of the past with new forms enabled by new material technologies.  New Formalist buildings embraced many Classical precedents such as building proportion and scale, classical columns, highly stylized entablatures, and colonnades.   Here the style was representative of banking and business much like Neo Classism was the language of commerce for centuries before. The introduction of a residential program into a classically gridded temple of commerce had elements that inserted easily, but the introduction of foreign systems like increasing the number of plumbing fixtures ten-fold required careful consideration, especially at the Teller Lobby.  The lobby is a space critical to understanding the buildings hierarchy of space and structural grid.  The office areas at each end of the buildings were refitted to living units, including […]
Read More