Architecture
A castle-like Art Deco building, surrounded by roads on all four sides, the former bank was built by the engineers Whinney, Son & Austen Hall between 1933 and 1935 and features carvings by the local sculptor John Ashton Floyd. It is constructed of Portland stone around a steel frame. Its neoclassical design is unusual for Manchester, the style perhaps more suited to the architecture of Liverpool, as most of Manchester's buildings were Neogothic.
"The proportions are ingeniously calculated, as Lutyens ... adored to do. The top stage is two-thirds of the stage from the obelisks to the next set-back, and that middle stage is two-thirds of the bottom stage." It is sometimes known as the The King of King Street because of its distinct structure and height.
Read more about this topic: 100 King Street
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)